


Distraction

by pheyne



Category: Inception (2010), NCIS
Genre: Crossover, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-26
Updated: 2011-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:35:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pheyne/pseuds/pheyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, on an island not so far away, a very special NCIS agent and the world’s best forger had a fling.  Years later, when a PASIV device winds up in the hands of Team Gibbs, Tony must come clean about his past relationship to catch a murderer, and Jethro must finally come to a decision about what he truly wants from his Senior Field Agent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a word about timelines. The first two parts of the prologue take place during the fifth season of NCIS between Bury Your Dead and Family, obviously pre-Fischer for Inception fans. The last part of the prologue takes place during the Fischer job and the seventh season of NCIS. The rest of the chapters follow in present time. No beta for the prologue. Also posted at livejournal.

(2008)

Eames went where he usually went when he was in Puerto Rico and looking for sex and drink.  La Hermosa Vista was a palm frond-roofed shanty masquerading as a bar on the most pristine beach on the island.  He slid onto a barstool and decided on the Macallan 18.  Mexico City had been hell, after all.  He deserved a little treat.

He took a sip and savoured the burn before turning to survey his options for the evening.  The sun had long since set and the glow from the bar’s flickering tiki torches bathed everyone in a very forgiving glow.  The women looked younger.  The men looked drunker.  There was an elegant blonde dancing barefoot on the small patch of sand that passed for the bar’s dance floor.  She swayed her hips, reached to pull up long waves of wheat-coloured hair, and revealed a slender neck that begged to be nipped.  Pert breasts unrestrained by anything so mundane as a brassiere.  Stomach flat and undulating beneath her silk blouse.  Just the hint of a belly ring.  Out of habit, Eames committed the details to memory.  Forging was a twenty-four seven job really.  She saw him watching her and smiled, her peach-coloured lips curving in an invitation Eames had learned to read before he’d learned to read.  She turned to offer him a better view of her clearly well-aerobicised arse and he caught sight of her dance partner.

Well, then.

While Eames had fucked his share of the truly beautiful, he preferred his partners with a little edge, a hint of imperfection at the very least though a conspicuous flaw was always welcome.  He’d always found that the human condition, full of tragic failings and magnificent strengths, held the sexiest sort of appeal.  The blonde’s dance partner blazed with both.  Broad shoulders.  Beautiful face.  Broken at a soul-deep level that made Eames ache with want.  He tossed back the rest of the Macallan and decided on a plan of attack.

The man looked like someone who appreciated a more traditional approach to things.  In the end, Eames fell back on the trite but oh-so-trustworthy.

“May I cut in?” he asked, sparing barely a glance for the blonde.

“Uh . . . sure.”  American, of course.  No other group of people on the planet spent that much on their hair.  “Thanks for the dance, Bridget.”

His soon-to-be lover stepped back from the blonde with a rueful smile and a quick brush of his lips across her knuckles.  The man thought Eames was cutting in on his play for Bridget and had chosen to play the gentleman.  How sweet.

Fortunately for both of them, Eames had managed to shed the shades of politeness ages ago.

“Yes, ta, Bridge,” Eames murmured with a smile before wrapping one arm around the man’s waist and leading him back to a shadowy corner of the sandy dance floor.  The man had an inch or two on him, but Eames had surprise on his side.

“Wow!  Yeah, okay.” 

One strong hand fell on Eames’ forearm, clutching for balance.  His boy was fighting hard to play catch up and quickly succeeding which impressed Eames in ways that had nothing to do with sex.  Beautiful was apparently smart, too.  It was a nice surprise.  It had been a long time since anyone had surprised Eames.

“I thought you were after Bridget.”

“And now that you know I’m not?”

Beautiful offered him a shy smile.  “You mean, am I going to hit you for hitting on me?”

Eames grinned back.  “Something like that.”

“Not with that accent.”

“Brilliant.”  God, it was good to be English some days.  “What about a drink then?”

He ordered a Margarita for his new friend, clearly not his first of the evening, and another Macallan neat for himself.  Tony’s eyes, startlingly green in the bar’s half-light, turned unexpectedly sombre when their drinks arrived.

“My boss likes bourbon,” he said when Eames asked.

“There’s a world of difference between bourbon and single malt scotch, darling.”  Eames took a sip.  “Do you often think of your boss while on holiday?”

“No.  Yes.”  Tony downed half his drink in a gulp.  “It’s complicated.”

“Isn’t it always?”

“Oh, you don’t know how good I can be at complicating things above and beyond the usual.”

So beautifully broken.

“So tell me.”

Eames didn’t often offer himself up as psychotherapeutic fodder but something in him wanted to hear the tale of how Tony with his sad eyes, sun-streaked hair, and perfect Spanish (judging from all the nervous small talk with Miguel their bartender) finished up on a beach in Puerto Rico.  There were layers here, certainly, and beneath them all an iron strength and resilience Eames knew he didn’t possess.  But the vulnerability wasn’t entirely an act either and it inspired an echoing something in him that might very well be sympathy.

“You didn’t pick me up to hear about my problems at work.”

Tony’s candid gaze was refreshing.  Yanks so rarely admitted that they were in it just for the sex.  Probably had something to do with the Puritans.

“No, but I don’t mind hearing them,” he replied and meant it.  “Besides, there isn’t a rush to this finish line, is there?”

“I guess not.”  The rest of the Margarita went down for courage.  Eames waved for another and Tony smiled.  “No qualms about fucking my brains out after getting me drunk and emotionally vulnerable?”

“I lost my subscription to moral scruples, I’m afraid.  If I ever had one.  Problem?”

“Not for me.”

An hour later, Eames was swimming in stories of a girl named Jeanne and a man named Gibbs while Tony drowned in a sea of tequila.  Eames got them back to Tony’s hotel because he had yet to arrange for a room of his own and never had anyone over to it regardless except for when he shared with Arthur.  Arthur.  What was it with him and men in emotionally doomed relationships these days?

He opened the door and helped Tony to the bed, flipped on the bathroom light for the inevitable post-binge pilgrimage to the loo, and prepared to be a gentleman after all.  Tony caught his hand as he moved to the door.

“I thought you said you didn’t have any moral scruples about this,” he murmured, head hanging upside down off the tail end of the bed, eyes now emerald green and bright.

“Perhaps I’d simply rather not finish up on the wrong end of all that tequila, Anthony.”

Tony snorted.  “I didn’t drink that much and what is it with you Brits and the ‘Anthony’ thing anyway?”

“Know lots of us Brits, do you?” Eames teased, still unconvinced.

“Our ME is Scottish.”

“We might be back to my original point about bourbon and scotch.”

“Come on, Eames,” Tony wheedled, drawing him closer to the bed.  “Tequila and one-night stands . . . they’re like Bogie and Bacall, Hepburn and Tracy, that couple in the Titanic movie.”

Eames laughed, leaned forward, and kissed the man.  He wondered how this Gibbs person held out against such boundless and easy charm.  He tasted tequila and sweetness and sorrow and gave up his reservations without much more of a fight.  _Embarrassingly easy, me_.  As Tony dragged him down to the bed, he tried for one last measure of restraint.

“Alright but try to remember something of this conversation in the morning, will you?  I do emotional morning-after scenes poorly.”

“I’m a big boy, Eames.”

They both grinned at that cliché.

“We’ll see about that.”

Unfazed, Tony started tugging at his shirt with unexpectedly nimble fingers.

“I always knew good things would happen to me in Puerto Rico.  Come here.”

They kissed again, filthy, wet, and needy.  Never a great believer in deferred gratification, Eames tugged at the zip to Tony’s trousers and was rewarded with Tony’s deep groan when he wrapped his fingers around the man’s cock.  Soon, his lips followed his hands and speech became a distant memory.

♣

Eames woke to the sound of his mobile ringing madly somewhere near the foot of the bed and the sight of Tony’s absolutely flawless jaw line, sharper for a day’s worth of dark stubble, on the pillow beside him.  He tried to ignore the mobile and concentrated instead on the memory of that jaw cradled in his hand as Tony screamed his pleasure and came on his cock.  He might have succeeded except for the object of his most recent sexual fantasies opening one bleary hazel eye and scowling at him.

“Are you gonna get that or what?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Eames.” 

Somehow, they all finished up using that tone on him.  Eames surrendered and flopped over to grope along the foot of the bed.  Bloody thing had fallen out here somewhere.  Fortunately or unfortunately, whoever was calling him was a stubborn bastard.  The mobile was still ringing when Eames finally found it, tucked between his hastily discarded shirt from the night before and Tony’s even more hastily discarded underpants.

“What?” he muttered into the handset.

“Where are you?”

Eames jerked upright, abruptly and impossibly turned on despite the last evening’s sexual marathon.  The man might have been the world’s most tremendous twat but Arthur’s voice always had that effect on him.

“How does that matter?”

“Eames, please.”  Arthur’s voice cracked over the unfamiliar word and Eames suddenly felt chilled despite the tropical clime.  “Not right now, okay?  Mal’s dead and I need your help.  I don’t know what the fuck to do.  They think Dom had something to do with it and I’m trying to get Miles to come take the kids but we can’t stay here and I just can’t think . . . .”

“Alright, darling.” 

The term slipped out thoughtlessly.  Eames called everyone ‘darling’ at some point or another in the course of their acquaintance.  But when Arthur immediately calmed, took a deep breath, and seemed to just fucking _trust_ him at the sound of it, Eames knew he’d never call anyone else ‘darling’ again.  He started pulling on clothes, careless of Tony’s questioning stare.

“Where were you going before this bit with Mal?”

“I . . . I had a job lined up in Rio.  With Miranda.”

“Right.  Well, you’re keeping your commitments, then.”

“What?”

“Get Cobb to Rio.  I’ll meet you there.”

“Gee.  Why didn’t I think of that?”  Pain was bringing out all of Arthur’s edges.  “Look, Eames, Dom only has the one passport.  His own.  If I try to book any flight with it right now, he’ll be eating breakfast with Metro PD.”

“You never got him a back-up passport?”

“I never got around to it.  They’re not exactly inexpensive, you know.”

“Where are you?”

“Seattle.  Dom’s place in Seattle.”

Eames ransacked his mental list of outstanding favours and came up with a half dozen possibilities.

“Well, get him up and packed and ready to go at the very least.  I’ll make a few calls.  You should be hearing from someone within the hour.  And Arthur?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sending you my fee schedule per passport.  We can work out a payment plan just like the banks.  This really isn’t the area to practise economic restraint, darling.”

Eames hung up before an overly distraught Arthur forgot himself enough to actually say ‘thank you’.  ‘Please’ had been bad enough.  Shirt.  Jeans.  Had he worn socks last night?  Ah, fuck the sodding socks.

“So, you forge passports?”  Eames turned slowly and found Tony watching him, eyes wary and voice flat with the start of a temper.  “I mean, normal people just book their international flights on Expedia and worry about the quality of the bottled water.”

Was it just last evening that he’d found intelligence sexy?  Well, by the light of day, intelligence was looking more like one extremely inconvenient pain in the arse.  Eames considered lying and dismissed it; Tony trusted his instincts on reflex and the man had good instincts, heartfelt employment in law enforcement notwithstanding.  Eames decided on a more straightforward reply.

“Admit it, Anthony.  You never really believed I worked in insurance.”

“Have you looked at yourself lately?” Tony’s gaze dropped to one of the tats on Eames’ chest.  “A three-year-old wouldn’t believe you work in insurance.  That doesn’t mean I automatically thought you were a fucking criminal.”

Eames couldn’t help feeling a little miffed.

“The insurance bit isn’t _that_ much of a stretch.  You haven’t seen me in a suit.”

“Put your ego aside for a minute, would you?  You’re missing the point.” 

Tony pulled himself up in the bed, apparently oblivious to the fact that the move tugged the bedsheets down below his waist.  Despite the fact that this thing between them could never be anything more than casual (never mind the whole cops and robbers bit, they were too much alike really), Eames couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret that he couldn’t loiter about in bed a little longer and enjoy the view.  But Arthur was a frighteningly uncharacteristic mess and Eames needed to get to Rio, rent hotel rooms, perhaps a car.  He stood and started prowling the room on the hunt for his shoes.

“Alright.  What is the point then?”

“Lying to me about what you do for a living because of the wife and kids back home is one thing . . . not a good thing, mind you, just a different thing.  Lying to me because you’re a fucking wanted criminal is something else altogether.  Jesus, Eames!  Did it miss your attention last night that I’m a goddamn federal agent?!”

“No, the badge was very impressive.” 

Not to mention instructive.  Eames had no idea if he would ever have the need to forge an NCIS badge but he was reasonably certain he now could if pressed.  Eames found a shoe, tried to tug it on, and found a sock stuffed in its toe.  He didn’t have time to hunt for its mate.  He chucked it back on the floor as Tony built up steam.

“Impressive?  That’s all you have to say?  Well, it’s gonna be even more impressive when I take you in . . . .”

“For what exactly?  Let’s hear it.  You don’t even know my name to a certainty.”

“It’s Eames,” Tony said without a flicker of doubt.  “You wouldn’t bother lying about that.”

Definitely too much alike.

“Well, if you’re planning a charge of sodomy, we’ll both have a great deal of explaining to do.”

“Cute.  Very cute.”  Nonetheless, the thought did seem to slow the man down for a minute, long enough for Eames to find his other shoe anyway.  “So, who’s Arthur?  Please don’t say ‘boyfriend’.”

Now, there was an arresting thought.  Eames paused.  Who exactly was Arthur to him anyway that he would drop everything to go to the man’s aid?  Certainly not a lover.  Perhaps never to be a lover considering the man’s enduring fealty to Cobb, who apparently may or may not have murdered his wife.  Eames grimaced at the thought.  He’d liked Mal for all that he’d known of her.  Family seemed as fitting a description for their dysfunctional little group as anything else.  Eames shrugged and pulled on his remaining shoe.  Why not? 

“Family comes in all shapes and sizes anymore.” 

“You’re unbelievable,” Tony muttered, clearly not meaning it in a good way.

Finally dressed, Eames paused at the door and glanced back at where Tony still sat with his back against the headboard, hazel eyes stormy and expensively streaked hair sticking up in spikes all over the bloody place.  It was a ridiculous look that could only appear sexy on someone as beautiful as that.  The man was definitely _someone’s_ lost Prince Charming.  Eames bit back a grin, knowing it wouldn’t be appreciated, and that, as much as anything else, sealed his decision.  Eames called few individuals friends.  He wasn’t emotionally needy enough to be incessantly seeking out new friends either but he always trusted his instincts when he finally met one.

“Look.  I’m truly sorry to fuck and run but travel into Rio is hell at Carnivale.  I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I’d call sometime?”

He made it out the door before the barrage of pillows hit.  Despite the bitter solemnity of Mal’s death and the faint tremor of panic left over from his conversation with Arthur, Eames couldn’t help but feel a little euphoric.  It had been a lovely night, worth every moment’s risk.  He slipped Tony’s mobile into his trouser pocket beside his own as he ran down the hotel’s stairwell and idly wondered how long it would take the man to notice its loss.  No matter.  That sort of thing happened all the time in dysfunctional families, didn’t it?

♦

(Thanksgiving 2010)

Between Abby and Ducky, Tony felt smothered with holiday cheer already.  Okay.  He'd come to accept that he'd be spending Thanksgiving at Casa Mallard instead of a casino and, truthfully, he could take or leave the gambling and didn't give a shit about the buffet but he hadn't seen Eames in forever and had really been counting on the man to relieve some of this impossible pent-up pressure that came hand-in-glove with working with Leroy Jethro Gibbs.  Instead, the best Tony could do was five measly minutes behind the vending machines, dialing with one eye fixed on the door.

Ring after ring after ring.  Tony rolled his eyes even though there was no one to see him.  This was pointless.  Half the time, Eames and his cell phone lived on separate continents.

Someone picked up the line just before Tony hit the button to disconnect.

“ . . . no, Ariadne, I really, _really_ do want that ventilation duct exactly there.  Just don’t tell Cobb about it if it bothers you so much.  Ta, love.”  Then, intentionally into the handset at last, “What?”

Tony smiled.  He leaned back against the sandwich machine and felt his shoulders loosen.

“Normal people start with ‘hello’.”  It was an old argument.

“Yes, well, normalcy is over-rated.  Was this some sort of spot test of phone etiquette?”

“No.” He reached back to rub his neck.  “I’m not going to make it.”

Eames sighed into the phone.

“Just as well, really.  Something’s come up here, too.”

“Arthur?”

“After a fashion.”

Experience had taught Tony that there was no point in pushing Eames when he got that particular tone in his voice, but he could smell the end of their friends-with-benefits arrangement in the air.

“Dare I hope your engagement has something to do with Gibbs?”

“After a fashion,” Tony parroted with poorly concealed sarcasm.  “He’s supposed to bring rolls to the damn dinner anyway.  How much you wanna bet we wind up with saltines?”

“Ah, the dulcet tones of sexual frustration.  I’m sorry but I keep missing this.  You’re not sleeping with the man because . . . ?”

“Rule Twelve.”

“Is that the one about the knives or the one about the pigeons?”

“Jesus, Eames!  There is no rule about pigeons.”

“Right.  Well, I’m not sure I want to know how knives impact your sex life, really.”

The sound of Tony’s teeth grinding traveled airspace across six time zones.

“Rule Twelve is Never Date A Co-Worker.”

Eames snorted.  “That’s easy enough then.  Don’t date the man.  Just fuck him.  We’ve covered this about a million times.”

“You are no help whatsoever, you know that?  Gibbs is straight.  And a marine.  Did you forget the married-four-times thing?”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?  _You do_.  Oh, for . . . . Look, Anthony.  No one strings you along like this for an entire decade simply because of your filing skills.”

“You are so not funny.  I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait.  At least tell me you’ll consider taking him out for drinks.  That’s innocuous enough, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know Gibbs.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this but I’ve never felt that to be a loss.”

“Whatever.  The point is you don’t take Gibbs _out for drinks_.  You bring beer to his house and watch him sand wood in his basement.”

“Do you know how absolutely devastated I was to learn that that was not a euphemism for anything remotely interesting?  This is abysmally adolescent.  I’m amazed you haven’t resorted to passing anonymous love notes in your infamous bullpen.  How do you expect to get the man in bed if he doesn’t even realise you’re interested?”

“I’m not trying to get Gibbs in the sack!” Tony hissed.  He could feel his face start to flush.  God only knew why he found these interactions stress-relieving.

“That is my bloody point!  _Do_ something, Anthony.  Anything.  Tell him he has pretty eyes.”

“Are you serious?”

“And desperate.  If you don’t resolve this mess soon, you’ll start adopting cats and we won’t be able to remain friends.”

“I have to go now, Eames.  Some of us work for a living.”

“I work.”

“In ways that involve paying taxes, not doing jail time.”

“Yes, that _does_ sound enticing.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Tony snapped his phone shut with a smile, re-energized just enough to face the prospect of driving home, getting changed, and heading over to Ducky’s without pitching a screaming fit.  Thank god for Eames.  Somehow, Tony didn’t think that was a frequently voiced sentiment.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, on an island not so far away, a very special NCIS agent and the world’s best forger had a fling. Years later, when a PASIV device winds up in the hands of Team Gibbs, Tony must come clean about his past relationship to catch a murderer, and Jethro must finally come to a decision about what he truly wants from his Senior Field Agent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to lonetread for the beta. Also posted at livejournal.

Unsurprisingly, Arthur believed in rules.  Alongside the reasonable ones (Always Go Armed) and the peculiar ones (Never Buy Blue Jell-O), there also lived the incomprehensible ones.  They were still entangled in Arthur’s king-sized bed when Eames discovered the most incomprehensible one of the lot.

“But I don’t understand,” he repeated yet again, loath to sound like an idiot but driven to honesty by a combination of emotional exhaustion and fabulous sex.

Beside him, head pillowed on his shoulder, Arthur glanced at him and squinted.  It was unnerving how Arthur managed to look like a Point Man even when starkers.

“Think about it.  We’d be distracted if we worked together.”

“I’m distracted now and we aren’t working.”

“Well, it would be worse if we worked together.”          

“Arthur, that’s mental.  Distraction is distraction.  Either way, one learns to manage it.”

Arthur shrugged, not buying the argument.  Eames sighed and ran his fingers through deliciously tousled chestnut hair.  Soft.  Fine.  Longer than he’d expected given Arthur’s usual do.  He would call the gesture casual except that he was painfully aware of how few people still alive on the planet had ever had permission to do this to Arthur.  In many ways, it was more personal than sex; it was a disruption of Arthur’s carefully crafted façade, his special brand of armor.  Eames loved knowing he could disrupt anything about Arthur.  He had worked hard enough to get the man’s attention after all, and now that he’d had a taste of what it meant to have a place in Arthur’s life, freely granted, Eames knew he wouldn’t be able to give it up. 

Frightening.  Powerful.  Addictive.

 _Arthur_.

So, they would be lovers, not co-workers, and he would learn to live with the inevitable times apart.  Eames frowned, suddenly reminded of his last conversation with another equally insane Yank.

“Do these things come numbered, Arthur?”

“What things?” Arthur was doing disturbing things involving nipples and his _mouth_... fuck.  Eames struggled to manage the distraction after all.

“Your rules, darling.”

Arthur raised his head from Eames’ chest and laughed, eyes puzzled.

“No, of course not.”  Then, after a thoughtful pause, “But it’s not a bad idea.”

No encouragement needed there.

“So you would really rather worry long-distance about whether I’m alive or dead?”

“Than see you get shot in the head first-hand?  Yeah, Eames, I would.  I know that’s a shocker, especially since I’ve been the guy to shoot you more often than not, but just go with this one, okay?”

It was as good as saying ‘please’ and Eames had never been able to deny Arthur anything when asked in that tone of voice.  He tried to put the thought aside, tangled one hand in Arthur’s hair, and tugged him down into a kiss.  He let his other hand trail down to a slender hip and coaxed Arthur slowly back into their own distinctive rhythm.  Even as he gripped the sheets and met Arthur thrust for thrust, however, Eames knew they would break this rule.  It felt as inevitable as the rising dawn.

♦

It was past ten o’clock on a weeknight.  Normal people were at home by now, petting the dog, feeding the cat, passed out on the sofa in a cheery little beer and pizza daze.  Tony didn’t want to think too hard about what it said about them that neither he nor Tim nor Abby seemed in any rush to leave the lab before dawn.  Instead, they stood clustered around Abby’s work table, gaping at whatever the hell it was Commander Wells had seen fit to stash under his bed, locked away in a metal briefcase that had taken Tim over an hour to open.

So far, they’d eliminated ‘bomb’ from the list of possibilities.  If they didn’t come up with something more soon, Gibbs was going to bust a nut.

“It looks like a daisy made out of tin cans,” Tony muttered, poking at one of the tin cans.  Nothing happened.

Tim fluttered at him like a mother hen protecting her last chick.

“Could you please not do that, Tony? It could be dangerous.”

“It’s not a bomb, McGee.  I would have found some trace of explosives inside the briefcase otherwise.”  Abby poked at another of the tin cans.  Again, nothing happened.

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous, Abs.”

“Well, we’ve been poking and prodding at it for over an hour, McGee.  At this point, I think I’m more likely to die of boredom than from whatever that is.”

Tim glared at him in frustration.  “It’s a delicate piece of equipment.  Figuring it out is going to take time.”

“How do you know it’s a delicate piece of equipment?  For all we know, it’s the latest thing in portable foot massagers.  Come on, people.  We have ten minutes, tops, before Gibbs shows up.  We need something better than ‘we’re–pretty–sure–it–won’t–blow–up–Boss’.  Let’s try a little free association here.  Abs.”

Abby picked up one of the endless yards of tubing, complete with attached needle, and cocked her head to one side.

“Some sort of automated acupuncture machine?”  She grimaced.  “Sorry.”

“Okay.”  Tony had to give her points for trying.  God only knew they were all dead on their feet, and Abby had a tendency to come up with the inventively whack-a-doo even when she was well-rested.  “McGee.”

“An alien brain-body transmutation device.  Don’t look at me like that, Tony.  You said, free associate.”

This was like the Cybervid agitated nun thing all over again.  He should have known better than to ask Tim to use his imagination.

“Yeah, in this reality, Elf-lord.  What?  Was that on a Star Trek episode or something?”

Tim sighed and rolled his shoulders, which probably meant ‘yes’.  “Okay.  How about this.  Abby, you said you found Commander Wells’ blood on one of the needles?”

Abby shook her head.  “I was just able to match blood types.  There wasn’t enough for DNA.”

“All right, but it’s still possible that this is some sort of a device for administering drugs, right?  I mean, the tubing looks like it’s designed to hook up to several people at once.”

“Two years in Baltimore narcotics, McGoo, and this would be the first time I’ve come across a scene where it cost more to buy the gear to shoot up than it did to buy the drugs.  Look at that thing.  It probably costs more than your yearly salary.”

“Fine, Tony.” Tim’s eyes flashed irritably.  “What do you think it is then?  And please don’t say some sort of sex toy.”

Tony grunted because he’d rather go with the alien whosit-whatsit than admit that he didn’t know and didn’t care and had been fighting the gut-level urge to toss the damn thing into the nearest dumpster since they first found it.  Whatever the hell it was, it was trouble.  Just look at Wells.  One minute, the man was a highly decorated Navy SEAL with enough black ops experience that Tony had managed to get only one marginally readable, minimally redacted paragraph out of fifty pages of service records.  The next minute, the man was blowing a hole in his head with a forty-five, the force of which tossed him off the sixth floor rooftop of his condo building and turned him into a bloody Rorschach on a Quantico sidewalk.

Driven by equal parts inspiration and exasperation, Tony pressed one latex-gloved finger to the center dial of their little daisy.  Suddenly, one of the tin cans depressed.  Something hissed.  A bead of clear liquid appeared at the tip of Abby’s needle. 

Then nothing. 

Anti-climactic didn’t begin to cover it.

“I’m guessing Viagra won’t be fixing that,” Gibbs drawled into his right ear, close enough that Tony swore he got stubble burn when he startled.

“Jesus, Gibbs!”                                                                                                     

Tony straightened and jumped back, practically into Gibbs’ arms.  The man had him boxed in against the work table and, for one dizzying split second, Tony savored the feeling of being soaked, head to toe, in the familiar smells of sawdust and coffee.

That was enough to turn things south of the border uncomfortably hard.  Cynically, Tony decided that he probably deserved a little pain and suffering.  Ten years into this experiment of working with Gibbs, Tony knew better than to stand with his back to the door.  There might be a few more gray hairs in that godawful haircut than when they first met but Jethro Gibbs would go down a Marine regardless of age.  It would take a lot more than a few sleepless nights and an overload of cases to make the man breathe any faster or tread any heavier.

“Something to report, DiNozzo?”  Gibbs was close enough that Tony could feel the man’s breath on his cheek.

“Uh... we just had a break-through?”

“That’s a little generous, Tony,” Tim muttered.  “But I think we can safely say that this is some sort of device for injecting drugs, Boss.”

“What kind of drugs?”

This wasn’t the first time the man had invaded Tony’s personal space.  This time, though, Gibbs made no move to step away from him and Tony felt sealed to the spot like candle wax melting fast under Gibbs’ heat.  He usually had a better sense of self-preservation than this.

“Give me a little time with my babies and I’ll tell you, Gibbs,” Abby promised, tapping the tip of the needle into a vial. 

“How long?”

She shrugged and turned to start processing their newly found evidence.  “If it’s one of the usual suspects, ten minutes.  If I have to check it against our entire database of compounds, well, longer.”

“What about the Commander’s cell phone?”  Gibbs took a step to squint at the computer screen over Tim’s shoulder and Tony took the opportunity to finally breathe again.

The lab felt colder without Gibbs next to him.

“It would have helped if he hadn’t landed on it, Boss.  Most of the phone was a loss.”  Tim’s fingers raced over Abby’s keyboard in his usual staccato, machine-gun-fire tempo.  “But I was able to pull up the last three phone calls he made.  One call to his C.O. and the other to the Bethesda Naval Hospital main switchboard.  I’ve requested the switchboard records for the time of the call.  The third was to an international number and all I can tell you so far is that it’s a U.K. prefix but I’m still working on it.”

“Give the number to Tony.  I want you to go back to Wells’ C.O.  and find out what they talked about.”

“Now, Boss?” His little probie had come a long way since they first started working together but Tim was never going to be the sort of agent that worked himself into an early grave.  Not like Gibbs.  When it came to it, not like Tony.  “It’s... uh, close to midnight.”

“Great.  That means there’ll be less traffic on your way out to Quantico.  DiNozzo, with me.”

“On your six, Boss.”

Tony grabbed the post-it from Tim, ignored Abby’s  manic burst of sign language because, no, he didn’t always know what was going on in Gibbs’ head, and followed the man into what the rest of the world considered an elevator and Gibbs considered Conference Room B.  He slid in just as the silver doors started to close.

Not unexpectedly, Gibbs slammed on the brakes practically before the elevator started moving.

Tony decided to take the offensive.  Rule Six was a piece of crap in his opinion anyway.  Never Apologize was definitely a one-way street.  Life with Gibbs always ran a little smoother if he just started blindly apologizing first and found creative synonyms for the word ‘sorry’ along the way.

“Boss, I know I said I thought the Wells case looked like a suicide but I can explain….”

“Why didn’t you tell me Leon offered you the position in Jacksonville?”

For a moment, Tony just gaped at him.  He hadn’t been expecting this.

“ _That’s_ what the director wanted to talk to you about this morning?”

“He said you turned him down.”

“Of course, I turned him down.”  Just like he’d turned down Los Angeles and, before that, Rota.

“Why?”

“Why the sudden interest in my career planning?”

That got Gibbs to glance at him for a second at least, although the pained look in those bright blue eyes set Tony back a bit.  He hadn’t seen Gibbs look like that since Jenny died.

“You can’t keep turning them down.  Eventually, they stop offering.”

“Believe it or not, I’m okay with that.  Not everyone wants to be team leader, you know.”

“You’re saying _you_ don’t want to be team leader?”

Tony shrugged and tried to pretend that he hadn’t spent years of sleepless nights pondering that question.  In the end, leaving Gibbs would never be an option. 

“Been there.  Done that.  I’m good where I am now.”

“You’re the best where you are now,” Gibbs murmured in a voice that Tony had only ever heard directed at redheads and small children until now.  “But you’ve been great as a team leader, too.  It would be a mistake to hold back.”

“Gibbs .”  The sinking feeling in Tony’s gut said some serious shit was about to hit the fan and he wanted to scream at Gibbs to stop talking already.

“I told Leon to keep the posting open.  You just need to get the paperwork to him by next week.”

Gibbs snapped the elevator back to life as if his word fucking ended their conversation.  Of all the man’s bad habits, this was the one that Tony hated the most: Gibbs acting like he was everybody’s father and knew exactly what was best for all of them.  Well, Tony had always had a problem with father figures.

“I’m not sending in any paperwork.”

“It’s a done deal.”

“Done by whom?  Not by me.  Just tell me what’s going on, Gibbs.”

“I can’t stay your boss forever, that’s all.”

“You don’t want to do this.”  Tony knew it for a fact, could feel the unhappiness vibrating off the man in waves.

The lean jaw tightened then set.  Tony was suddenly and horribly reminded that Gibbs had a will of steel when it came to doing the right thing, bonus points if the right thing also hurt like a motherfucker.

“Maybe not,” Gibbs finally admitted, eyes still fixed dead ahead and posture Marine perfect.  He looked prepared to face a firing squad.  “But it’s what’s going to happen anyway.”

When the elevator doors finally slid open, Gibbs escaped – there was no other word for it – in a flapping swirl of Sears sports coat, leaving Tony staring blankly after him.  Ten years of fruitless pining and soul-searching, cold showers and way too much time alone with hand lotion, all ended in one blazing minute by his own personal deus ex machina.

What the hell had just happened, anyway?

One minute, the man had been in his space and it had been business as usual.  The next minute, Tony couldn’t decide if he was being fired or promoted.  Well, if Gibbs thought he was just going to obediently hand in transfer paperwork, then the man had finally gone delirious from inhaling too much boat lacquer. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Vance had more than a little something to do with sowing the seeds of Tony’s personal apocalypse.  Hell, one of the man’s first acts as director had been to exile Tony as an Agent Afloat.  Back then, with Jenny’s ghost standing between him and Gibbs at every turn, he’d almost welcomed the punishment.  This time, Tony wasn’t going without a fight. 

The feeling of impending loss refused to fade, though, and Tony clenched his hands in frustration, heard paper crinkle.

He finally glanced down at the post-it and blinked at Tim’s scribbled numbers until they came into focus.   That was when Tony finally recognized Eames’ cell phone number and knew he’d really arrived in hell.

♠

Eames rarely answered his mobile.  That wasn’t news to anyone who knew him, and most of the people who thought to hire him understood that they would get farther faster if they simply came to him in the flesh.  Or, these days, they called Arthur.  As a result, he rarely kept track of exactly where his mobile happened to be at any particular moment.  He’d left the last one somewhere in the wilds of Uzbekistan; the one before that still languished in Kuala Lumpur.  If it weren’t for Arthur perpetually stuffing his pockets with replacement mobiles, Eames would currently be working in peace.

As things stood, he let the sodding thing ring through to voicemail twice before even glancing at the caller ID.  The ubiquitous Unknown Caller, this time from an American number.  Since Arthur was currently employed in Istanbul, taking Cobb and Ariadne with him, that left only one other possibility.  Eames answered the call with a scowl, keeping one eye on the mark who, thank fuck, appeared to have set down roots in the bustling little bistro.

“Not a good time.  Working.”

Not uncharacteristically, Tony ignored the warning.  “Who is Mitchell Wells to you?”

“Who?”

“Commander Mitchell Wells, United States Navy SEAL.  Currently deceased and lying on a slab in my basement with your number on his cell phone.  Why was he calling you, Eames?”

“Lots of people call me, Anthony.  Recent experience alone should have taught you that I rarely answer.  I have no idea who Commander Wells was.  I never spoke with him.”

“No voicemails?  No hang-ups?”

“Lots of hang-ups.  No voicemails.  Just out of a mild curiosity, mind you, why the panic?”

“You have to ask?  You’re implicated in a case that I’m investigating, Eames.  Can this end any way except badly?  Before this, Gibbs had been happy with only exiling me to Jacksonville.  Once he finds out about _you_ , I’ll be lucky if he lets me stay on as the janitor.”

“Where the hell is Jacksonville?  Wait.  Don’t bother.  Not to belabour the obvious but you could just not tell him.”

Tony snorted, clearly unhappy.  “Great idea.  Because that’s always worked out so well for us.  Jeanne.  Jenny.  That mess with Agent Lee.  Not to mention our latest Mexican nightmare.  No way, Eames.  I’m going to have to tell him and just pray I survive the experience.”

“Hmm.”

“Thanks for the concern.”

“What?  No, I was just wondering how your commander got the number to my mobile.  I’ve only had this one a month, after all.”

“Three weeks.”

“Thank you.  The point is that the number isn’t exactly common knowledge.  I _gave_ it to you, for whatever reason, or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

“It’s not listed anywhere?”

“Where exactly?  The Criminal Yellow Pages?”

“I’m so sorry,” Tony snapped back, imminent unemployment apparently bringing out his temper.  “How the hell would I know how you guys find each other?”

“You make it sound like a dating service.  How did your commander die, anyway?”

Tony paused.

“You called me, remember?” Eames prompted when no answer appeared forthcoming.

“It was either the large calibre gunshot wound to the right temple or the six-story fall off the roof.  Take your pick.  I’m going with the gunshot wound to keep the timeline neat.”

For a moment, the world around Eames went a little fuzzy around the edges, felt a bit less than real.  He could see the scene Tony described.  Hell, he _had_ seen it nearly a hundred times before.  How many people in dreamshare had he watched shoot themselves off rooftops in some sort of dramatic kick back to reality?  It had been Mal Cobb’s favoured method of self-execution.  She used to say it was the only way she could be sure she wouldn’t spend the rest of the time left in the dream bleeding out in pain and misery while listening to Arthur’s eternal Edith Piaf.

“What else did you find on your commander?”

“Watch.  Wallet.  A pretty good selection of porn on his laptop.”  Tony’s tone was cautious.  “You’re going to have to be more specific than that if you’re trying to weasel classified information out of me.”

Escalating concern and innate curiosity won out over caution.  Eames took a deep breath and plunged in.

“A device about a foot in diameter made up of anywhere from four to eight cylinders surrounding a central activator button.  Loads of attached intravenous tubing.  Usually found in a metal briefcase for nostalgia’s sake given today’s airport security measures.”

“You know what it does.”  It was as much an answer as a question.

“Don’t touch it.”

“Don’t come here,” Tony barked back, demonstrating that bizarre mind-reading skill he periodically possessed.  “I’d have to arrest you if you came here.  Stay wherever it is you are and let me handle it.”

“How?  By offering up my mobile number to Gibbs and begging for mercy?  You have no idea what your commander was involved in.”

“And you do?” 

Silence could be such a challenge to fill sometimes.  Eames knew he let this one stretch on too long but all he could think was that Arthur had gotten him this mobile.  Tracing the number would only lead back to Arthur.  If Commander Wells had been calling to reach Arthur, and Commander Wells was now dead, then....

“Tell me what it does, Eames.”  Tony smashed ruthlessly into Eames’ round robin internal monologue of rising panic.

It would take time to quit this job, but it was a crap job anyway.  Any forger would have done.  Eames had only taken it on to keep busy while Arthur was in Istanbul, adhering to this ridiculous never-work-together rule of his.  Eames would leave Chavez a list of forgers a mile long.  That should go a long way to assuage any hurt feelings – though, at the moment, he couldn’t have cared less if he never worked in dreamshare again.

Then it would only be a matter of booking a flight into Washington-Dulles and outing Tony to his friends and co-workers before gambling on their friendship to finagle a deal that would hopefully keep Eames out of jail while he worked out exactly what a Navy SEAL had been doing with a PASIV device and stopped the backlash from reaching Arthur.

“I _am_ sorry, Anthony,” Eames murmured with rare sincerity before hanging up.

♥

Dom was a terrible nurse, Arthur decided.  He felt like shit, and two hours spent wandering hand-in-hand through the Grand Bazaar with Ariadne only to show back up with a bottle of out-dated aspirin and a hot water bottle did not constitute any sort of medical care whatsoever.  He stared across the room at where the man now stood huddled with Ariadne debating some god forsaken piece of architectural esoterica while purposely ignoring Arthur’s sinuses. 

Arthur officially accepted that the Istanbul job had been a bad idea.

Arthur was also honest enough to admit that he felt sorry for himself mostly because Eames wasn’t there.  He was still a long way from agreeing with Eames that they should work together again but a little phone call to take the edge off wouldn’t hurt.  He glanced down at his watch.  Eight at night here.  That made it around two in the afternoon in Sao Paolo.  Arthur hit speed dial one before he finished the thought.

And listened to the damn thing ring and ring and ring.  If Eames had left the fucking phone in another fucking bus station bathroom, Arthur was going to kill him.  As if inspired by the mere thought of a violent death, the man answered on the very next ring.

“’Lo, darling.” 

In the background, someone announced a departing flight for Dulles, and Arthur scowled.  The job with Chavez wasn’t due to tie up for another week.

“Where are you?”

“Have you ever considered starting our phone conversations in a slightly different vein?  ‘I’ve missed you’ sounds particularly promising.”

“That’s obvious or I wouldn’t be calling.  Is that the Sao Paolo airport?”

“You have the ears of a bat.  Did you know that, Arthur?”  Eames huffed into the phone, setting those bat-like ears on edge.  “Look.  It’s nothing.  Just a thing with a friend.  I’ll see you back home in a week, yeah?”

 _A thing with a friend?_   Eames was damn lucky that Arthur wasn’t the jealous type.  Mostly.

“Just tell me.”

“Better not, I think.”

“Eames....”

“I have to go.  I’ll see you in a week, darling.  Say nice things to the children for me.”

Then the line went dead and Arthur was left pressing a silent phone to his ear.  He could call back and push the point but something stopped him.  He refused to call it pride.  He settled for pulling up the times for all the flights leaving Sao Paolo for Washington-Dulles that day and imagining Eames and his surprisingly finicky palate coping with vacuum-sealed beef stew at thirty thousand feet.

It wasn’t until the next evening, when the entire Sao Paolo production went tits up and Chavez ended the debacle by shooting himself in the head while facing off Brazil’s finest on international television, that Arthur started to worry.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NCIS meets Inception over a PASIV device and a dead Navy SEAL. This round: Gibbs v. Eames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s Note: special, special thanks to Jude and lj user lonetread for their beta efforts and for putting up with an unholy amount of unnecessary rewriting angst. Thanks guys. Also crossposted at lj and dreamwidth.

Tony hadn’t thrown up before work since his first day at Peoria P.D. Even the Black Death hadn’t driven him to his knees before the porcelain god. One sleepless night spent coming up with Gibbs’ top ten list of favorite ways to fire his senior agent, though, and Tony would be lucky to make it to work before noon. Two hours and as many wardrobe changes into the morning, he was still no closer to exiting his front door. Irrationally, he blamed Gibbs. If the man had ever learned how to work his inbox, Tony could have just emailed the details of this disaster to him from home and coped with rejection, humiliation, and unemployment from the comfort of his sofa. With a bucket.

He was down to the dry heaves by the time his doorbell rang. Because he wasn’t the luckiest person alive, Tony reached for his Sig before he went to answer it. He almost used it when he found Eames staring back at him, looking wrinkled and travel-worn and only too solidly _there_. Tony shook his head and barred entry by waving the Sig which turned out to be as effective as using bug spray on Cujo.

“Oh. _Hell_. No.”

“You have vomit on your shirt,” Eames offered by way of a greeting before shouldering his way in and dropping his travel bag on Tony’s sofa. Tony picked up the bag and tossed it back at the man.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing here but you’re definitely not staying.”   

“That’s hardly friendly.” Eames looked him over critically and frowned. “You look terrible.”

“Thanks. It’s my impending unemployment look.”

Eames rolled his eyes and wandered into the kitchen. Tony could have told him that his hunt for anything edible in there was doomed to failure; it had been one hell of a long week at work. Instead, he watched Eames hunt and peck and concentrated on not feeling nauseated for the first time in what felt like days. Eames as a cure for puking. Who knew.

“Gibbs isn’t about to sack you for your flexibility in bed partners. From everything you’ve ever told me about the man – which has not been inconsiderable, Anthony – he’s the last bastion of freedom and justice in the modern world.”

“Yeah, well, the bastion isn’t going to have to think twice before kicking my ass to the curb for compromising his case, Eames. It’s not that I slept with you – okay, maybe the part about sleeping with a felon wouldn’t exactly make his morning – but it’s the part where I called you up and told you about the case that’s going to flip his switch.”

“Look. You’re getting your knickers in an unnecessary twist.”

Tony snorted. “I don’t think I even wear knickers.”

“Personal choice. Whatever suits you, really.” Eames emerged from the kitchen with an open box of Captain Crunch. “I didn’t think these _could_ get moldy. You need to go food shopping. More to the point, you need to get me a glimpse of that PASIV device.”

Tony laughed.

“Does that even need an answer?”

“I don’t think your dead SEAL was trying to reach me at all.”

“He dialed your number by accident three times?”

“No. He dialed my number three times to reach Arthur, and there are only two reasons why anyone calls Arthur. Well, aside from me. Either the man had a nasty job in the offing or he was selling something.”

“Great. How does that translate into me violating national security for you?”

“If he was selling something, the PASIV may very well offer some key points as to what that was.”

There was some semblance of logic there, but. “The answer is still ‘no’, Eames.”

“You were clearly planning on going to work today.” Eames gestured at what had once been prime Dolce but was now a sweat-and-vomit stained rag. “Doesn’t NCIS sponsor a bring-a-friend-to-work day?”

“Eames.”

“Just hear me out. Loads of people pay obscene amounts of money for one of my plans, you know. Get me into NCIS. Just two minutes with the PASIV should give me some idea of what Wells was about, might even give me some idea of why he finished up dead on a sidewalk – which I would, naturally, pass along to you.”

“Naturally.”

“And I’ll be gone.”

“And what do I tell Gibbs?”

“You know my take on telling Gibbs anything but, if you must, tell him you tracked the phone number to me and leave it at that.”

“Lie to him, in other words.”

“By omission, perhaps. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

It would be the first time he had to live with the lie, though. Tony had come clean about every other lie he’d ever told Gibbs. That sounded vaguely pathetic, even in the privacy of his own mind. He couldn’t believe he was even considering this for one sick minute.

“You can’t go dressed like that,” Tony said before he could debate the voices in his head into a one-way ticket to in-patient psych at Bethesda. “You look like Bozo the Clown. Doesn’t Arthur have the slightest urge to dress you?”

“Arthur admires my personal panache,” Eames lied with a grin. “But lend me something if it’ll make you feel better. Then we should go. In my limited experience, one has a far better chance of successfully breaking and entering into government premises at the earliest possible version of dawn rather than at midday.”

♠

Gibbs strode off the elevator to find McGee already at his desk and picking sprinkles off his damn donut. Tony’s desk sat empty. It was well past oh-seven-hundred. Gibbs mood dipped from sour to absolutely vile.  He drank the last of his coffee and tossed the cup in the trash by his desk.

“Where’s DiNozzo?”

“He called to say he was tracking down a lead on that phone number. Hey, Boss.” McGee held up a postcard of blue skies, blue water, and lots of half-naked people on a beach. “Look at what was in my mail this morning. It’s from Ziva.”

No doubt having a good time with Ray. Well, she deserved a break. Gibbs grunted and clicked on his email, mostly because Leon had ripped him a new one at the last weekly debrief for not ‘logging on’ in over a month. That and for holding Tony’s career back because he was selfish in addition to being a bastard. Great. Forty-two new messages. He forwarded them all to Tony. Served the man right. _Following up a lead, my ass._ It was probably that blonde in the evidence garage. One last fling before Florida.

In fact, Gibbs put an automatic forward to Tony on all his emails. He’d blame it on a power surge or something. His team didn’t believe he could work a damn computer anyway. Tony’s replacement could figure out how to fix it.

Tony’s replacement.

That was never going to be possible.

“How’d it go with Wells’ C.O., McGee?”

His future Senior Field Agent sat up a little straighter in his chair.

“Uh, well, Captain Turner was less than thrilled to see me back on his doorstep at one in the morning. All he would say is that Wells had called in sick that day. Apparently, the commander had been out a lot over the past month with some sort of virus.”

“Did the Captain say what Wells had been working on?”

“No. Well, yes. And no. He said I didn’t have the security clearance to even ask the question. Then he slammed the door in my face.”

“Pull up Wells’ bank statements again.” There had been something there that bothered Gibbs, never mind that McGee thought it all matched up just fine. “I wanna take another look at them when I get back from Abby’s.”

“On it, Boss.”

Gibbs left the bullpen to a symphony of clattering computer keys. McGee would never be Tony. It wasn’t fair to the man to expect him to be, but Gibbs had a suspicion he was going to be unfair to a lot of people once Tony packed up. He might have passed it off as a joke at the time, but he’d always meant it as truth. Tony would always be irreplaceable. To him.

♦

“Well? Is it or isn’t it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Glad you’re here,” Tony muttered, glancing over at the forensics lab door. “Hurry up. She’ll be back any second.”

Eames stared down at the bits and pieces of what had once been a PASIV device but were now no more that metallic detritus of what-might-have-been gathered carefully into a plastic bin. He picked up one of the glass vials, shook the clear liquid within, and frowned. Definitely something wrong here.

“You have to be one of the least patient people I’ve ever met. What I mean to say is that, yes, it appears to have the same basic skeletal framework of a PASIV device, but, no, it is not actually the same as the PASIV devices I’ve encountered in the past. Happy now?”

“Not even close. We need to go.”

“We just got here.”

“Well, we were late.”

And whose fault had that been? Eames resisted the urge to snap at the man. Tony wasn’t entirely to blame for the fact that the dry heaves had continued to plague him, after all. Besides, if Tony hadn’t looked a bit like lukewarm death, their little gothic angel wouldn’t have been persuaded to leave them unattended in her castle while she went to get him a Caf-Pow, whatever the hell that might be.

Of course, Eames had found Abby Sciuto captivating from the start. From the industrial knee high boots to the pig-tails to the Newlydeads blaring out on her stereo, she was a forge just begging to happen. The only problem was the woman’s disturbing tendency to bounce simply everywhere. That and he wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t too much to be believed.

Despite the woman’s apparent penchant for dissecting all things technological, however, the strange PASIV looked as if it remained functional. Eames held up one end of translucent tubing and wondered if the urge to hook himself up constituted addiction, healthy curiosity, or a death wish. Tony removed the temptation when he plucked the tubing out of Eames’ hand and started tossing bits back in the bin.

“Come on, Eames. Your two minutes are up. It’s almost eight and Gibbs will be down here soon. We gotta go.”

Somewhere in the depths of his borrowed suit, Eames’ mobile rang. Unknown Name.  Ironically, just one brief day earlier, he would have let it ring through to his voicemail.  As things stood, Eames settled for answering in the most nondescript fashion possible.

“Yeah,” he muttered into the handset as Tony eyed him impatiently from the other end of the table.

“Arthur?” the voice on the other end asked, suspicious.

Eames had known already, with near-absolute certainty, that Wells had been trying to reach Arthur. There was nothing scattered on the table in front of him that required a forger’s skill. Even so, confirmation was always appreciated. Thankfully, Eames’ American accent had always been one of his better ones, even before he’d started spending all his free moments with Arthur and his New York syllables.

“Who’s this?”

“You’re a hard man to get on the phone.”

“Not so easy to keep on the phone, either. Who is this?”

“Just a friend of Mitch’s. Have you thought any more about our offer?”

“What offer was that?”

“You know what offer. It won’t be open much longer. Other people don’t share your reluctance to try new things.”

“Jesus, Eames! Hurry the fuck up!” Tony hissed with an agitated rolling motion of his wrist. 

Eames turned away from the distraction. God knew it was flattering to think he made this look that easy but holding up his end of a conversation when he had no bloody idea what they were talking about was not _actually_ easy at all. That said, Eames adored channeling Arthur. There was a certain freedom to saying whatever popped into his mind without politely rephrasing it and knowing people were too sodding terrified to call him on it.

“Great. Go talk to them then and stop wasting my time.”

“No, wait. Don’t hang up!”

“You have ten seconds to inspire me.”

“Just give it a test run. Five minutes. It sells itself.”

“Where?”

There was a telling pause.

“You’re local? I heard you were in Istanbul.”

Eames frowned, uncomfortably paranoid with the idea of others keeping such close track of Arthur’s travels.

“I can be,” he said finally.  “Tonight.”

“Ten o’clock. Place called The Cage. You know it?”

Eames had misspent his youth in places with names like “The Cage” and, in his experience, they were generally nightmares of loud music, absent lighting, and barricaded exits. But bailing this job meant leaving Arthur in danger which wasn’t an option.

“How do I find you?”

“I’ll find you,” the man said, worryingly, and the line went dead.

Tony made a grab for the mobile before Eames could even snap it shut.

“I’m gonna kill you,” he promised. “What the hell was that?”

“That was me, arranging a meet. Isn’t that what you law enforcement types call it?”

“We law enforcement types call it impeding a fucking investigation, Eames. Who the hell was it?”

“He didn’t say.”

“That’s it.” Tony’s lips set in a thin line. “Give me the phone.”

“Why?”

“We’re tracing the call.”

“Did it occur to you there may be calls here I’d prefer you didn’t trace?”

“You should have thought about that before you started playing undercover agent. Give me the phone.”

“Anthony, really. This is poor thanks for doing your job.”

“How was that doing my job?”

“Well, we have a date with Wells’ partner-in-crime now. That’s a gain, isn’t it?  Don’t look so peeved, pet.”

By then, Tony had him bent backwards over Abby’s metal work table at an uncomfortable angle. Eames had little choice but to surrender the mobile which he did with good grace, a grin, and a brief, chaste peck to Tony’s unhappy lips.

Sadly, that was also when Eames glanced over into the icy blue eyes of Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

♠

People in dreamsharing died young. Unlike some, Arthur had gone into the business fully aware of that fact. Mal was the rule, not the exception. In spite of totems and mantras and some frighteningly regimented work schedules, all of them started questioning reality eventually until, as was probably unavoidable in a group of people who routinely went armed, someone shot himself in the head.

Even in dreamsharing, though, three deaths in two weeks was a brisk bit of business. The most worrisome part was that Arthur would never have noticed if he hadn’t been scouring news clips for signs of Eames. The man wasn’t answering his phone anymore. Or maybe he just wasn’t answering Arthur’s calls which wasn’t exactly a more reassuring option. Arthur had started to panic. Arthur had never panicked over a lover before and he hated the feeling. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since he had last spoken to the man and Arthur was struggling to just keep moving. Working was out of the question.

When the news clips proved to be a bust, Arthur did what he’d once promised he would never do: he traced all of Eames’ calls. He narrowed the ones from the past two weeks down to those made to or from the D.C. area. The results just hiked his panic up another notch. Three calls from the Navy Yard (god only knew who Eames was friends with in the United States Navy, for fuck’s sake). Three calls from Mitchell Wells. Judging from the length of the calls, Eames had let them all go to voicemail, but that thought brought Arthur no comfort.  Mitch Wells, part-time Navy SEAL and full-time sleazy loose cannon, who talked too much and knew too little, had been calling Arthur to peddle his brand of shit for months. Arthur had put him off each time, but others hadn’t. Now, three of them were dead and Mitch Wells was dead and Eames was in D.C. in the eye of the fucking storm.

Arthur reached across the hotel bed for his laptop. He’d sworn he wouldn’t get angry about this. No anger allowed because he was channeling all that energy, saving it up in anticipation of  beating the ever-loving crap out of Eames once he finally got the man out of whatever mess he’d managed to bury himself in this time.

Only Dom Cobb, failed dreamscape retiree, stood between Arthur and the door now.

“Arthur, just stop packing for a minute and talk to me. Where do you think you’re going? The job is supposed to go down tonight.”

Arthur didn’t pause. He gathered up phone, Beretta, and change of clothes, stuffing them all into his travel bag with a lack of care Eames would have applauded. Two bankcards and three fake passports, the last one a birthday present from Eames that he’d laughingly handed over after licking cake and ice cream off Arthur’s body one lazy Sunday afternoon in Barcelona. Arthur faltered. The man was in his every single thought.

 _Fuck_.

“The job is off, Dom.”

“It can’t be off. We already have a down-payment.”

“Refunded to the client forty minutes ago. Check your email.”

“Check my email?” Dom stared at him like he’d just started speaking Latin. “Why do I have to check my email when we’re in adjoining hotel rooms? You could have just told me.”

“I just did.”

“Damn it, Arthur! Just stop running around for a minute, would you?”

“I can’t. Tight schedule, Dom.” Arthur slipped the back-up .22 into his ankle holster and he was ready to go.

In the end, Ariadne broke him. He shouldn’t have been surprised. With her wide-eyed idealism and peculiar brand of honesty, Ariadne was a dangerous woman, especially in their line of work. All it took was her hand on his arm and her eyes on his face.

“Something’s really wrong, isn’t it?” she’d said, already sure of his answer. “What is it?”

Arthur swallowed, tried to step around her, couldn’t.

“It’s Eames,” he finally admitted.

“Eames,” Dom echoed.

“Yes.”

“You’re sleeping with Eames?” Dom sounded shocked out of his mind at the idea.

Arthur frowned at the man he’d considered, in turn over the years, a co-worker, an infatuation, a friend, and, at last, a brother.

“Dom, you knew that.”

“I didn’t.”

“Eames sent you a Christmas card with both our names on it.” Eames had forged Arthur’s fucking signature on it, but that was a different argument.

“I thought he was kidding.”

“Congratulations, Dom. I think you may just be the last to know, and you’re at least a year out of the loop anyway.” Ariadne pushed her hair back and kept her eyes on Arthur. “What’s happened to Eames? What sort of trouble is he in?”

“And is it coming to my house?” Dom muttered, ignoring Ariadne’s startled look. “This isn’t the moment to be naïve, Ari. Eames isn’t the most stable guy, and the sort of shit he plays with can destroy lives. Trust me.”

Coming from the man Arthur had followed around the world for two years as his projections of his dead wife shot Arthur repeatedly in the kneecaps, it was an amazing statement, and Arthur stared at Dom for a full minute, letting the words soak slowly into his brain. Dom watched him, unapologetic. Somewhere in Arthur’s head, a switch flipped, and he suddenly realized he’d stopped considering them an exclusive team somewhere along the way, somewhere between Dom risking Arthur’s life in Limbo during the Fischer job and the first time Arthur had watched Eames fall to pieces under him, his eyes bright and wide and frighteningly vulnerable.

“No, you should be fine,” Arthur said in the end. “Go home. Take a break from any jobs for awhile. If anyone calls to sell you something, hang up. I’ll call once I have things sorted.”

Dom looked like he already had one foot on the flight back to his kids, but Ariadne’s loyalties were not so easily appeased.

“Arthur, if you need help….”

Arthur smiled. 

“I know I look like I’m barely fifteen sometimes, Ariadne, but I actually do have some idea what I’m doing here. I’ll be fine. Better if I don’t have to look out for anyone else.” He didn’t want to think about why Eames no longer counted in that tally.

“Okay.  If you’re sure.” She sounded unconvinced.

“He’ll be fine,” Dom said, only too convinced. For better or worse, the man had always considered Arthur invincible, infallible, and the perfect point man. Unlike Eames, who considered Arthur funny, repressed, and perpetually in need of a serious shagging. Arthur felt something end inside him.

“I left your return tickets in Ariadne’s suitcase,” he said, turning to leave.

Dom stopped him before he reached the door with a surprisingly gentle hand on one shoulder.

“Are you sure about this?”

Arthur thought about history and friendship, laughter and loss.

“It’s Eames,” he said simply.

Dom mouth twisted in a smile. Like the man, the smile was complicated, full of shades of Mal and a determination that bordered on the dangerously self-absorbed. Beneath it, Arthur was surprised to see regret. Perhaps Dom had glimpsed more of reality over the years than Arthur had given him credit for after all. 

Not an end then. Maybe just something different.

“Good luck, Arthur,” Dom murmured and let him go.

♣

Gibbs stood in Observation and stared at the man on the other side of the mirror. He tapped the painfully thin folder against his leg and scowled. It didn’t matter how many times he made Abby run the guy’s prints through Interpol; nothing pulled up. Somewhere along the line, Eames had paid someone a lot of money to wipe his slate clean.

And now he sat in Gibbs’ playpen wearing Tony’s god-damn suit.

Just the fact that he could remember the last time Tony had worn that pinstripe number to work made Gibbs want to spit nails.

He’d relived the scene in Abby’s lab dozens of times in his head already. It seemed set on perpetual replay now. The look in Tony’s eyes. The way the two men had folded into each other, into a fucking kiss that wasn’t their first if Gibbs knew anything about that sort of thing and, after three stinking divorces, he knew _everything_ about that kind of thing. Shit. The man _knew_ Tony, god-damn it, and now Gibbs was having a hard time deciding what pissed him off the most: the fact that he’d actually kinda bought Tony’s half-assed frat boy impersonation, or the fact that Eames had beaten him in a race he’d never really accepted he was running.

Just the idea of the two men in bed together made his blood boil. Gibbs didn’t want to think about it but his imagination kept painting unhelpful pictures for him all the same. _Damn it_. If he didn’t get a grip, he was going to rip Eames apart the minute he stepped into Interrogation.

Behind him, the door opened and closed. McGee came to stand next to him, moving slowly like he was trying not to spook a very wild, very dangerous animal. Gibbs smiled sourly. Not too far from the truth, actually.

“Hey, Boss. I – uh, was down in Abby’s lab. She said to tell you that Eames was right about how to access more of the drug out of the device. She’s running more tests but she still hasn’t been able to identify it.”

“Where’s Tony?”

“With Abby.”

“He can’t be in her lab, McGee. Compromises the evidence.” 

 _More. Compromises the evidence_ more _, Jethro_.

The words tasted stale in Gibbs’ mouth. He spat them out and resisted the urge to growl in frustration. God damn Tony for creating these situations anyway.

“I didn’t know where else to put him.” McGee sounded lost, as if the revelation that Tony was not only gay but had been having regular sex with a likely felon had regressed him right back to FLETC. “I mean, I didn’t want to put him in holding, and if I put him in the conference room, Director Vance would want to know....”

“Shit.”

Gibbs turned on his heel, ignored the startled look on McGee’s face that, yes, he was just like the next guy and had served in the damn Marines for god’s sake and so knew a swear word or twenty. He couldn’t put this off anymore. If Leon got involved in this mess, he’d have both men in adjoining cells by dinner, and Gibbs wouldn’t be able to live with that.

Gibbs slammed the door shut in Interrogation. Eames never flinched. Career criminal. This was not the man’s first rodeo. Gibbs took the seat across from him and didn’t bother opening the nearly empty folder.

“How’s Anthony?”

Of course, he would try to take control of the situation from the start. Well, Gibbs had slapped back worse than Eames for those sort of tactics before now.

“Not your concern. Tell me about the device we found in Wells’ apartment.”

Eames shrugged and tilted his chair back on its hind legs, eyed him like he knew that wasn’t the question Gibbs really wanted to ask.

“You know, there are people who would pay millions for what I’m about to tell you.”

“Too bad you’re not talking to one of them.”

Eames laughed.

“I think I finally understand what he sees in you. Well, the abbreviated version then. It’s called a PASIV device.  Portable Automated Somnacin Intravenous device. It allows individuals to share in a common dream. And it was devised by your government as an alternative to war games.”

Gibbs stiffened, and Eames grimaced.

“Yes, as a Marine, I expect you would appreciate its peculiar advantages.”

Gibbs wanted to hit the man until he coughed up what other little tidbits of personal history Tony has passed along about Gibbs under the guise of god-damn pillow talk. _Keep your head on your job, Gunny_.

“No one dies,” Gibbs said instead. “No one gets hurt, but you can keep trying to kill each other until you wake up.”

“Close. Dying in a dream generally wakes you up.”

“Generally?”

Eames shrugged and lowered his chair legs back to the floor but Gibbs wasn’t fooled. There had been a bad experience there.

“Exceptions to every rule.”

“Is that why Commander Wells is dead? Because of an exception to one of your rules?”

Eames frowned. “Not my rules and I don’t think so. I think your commander was playing a dangerous game. He appears to have been supplementing his paycheck with a few unorthodox moonlighting activities or else he wouldn’t have had a PASIV device in his possession at all.”

“Not even if he was involved in this project?”

“It’s not the sort of work one brings home from the office. Besides, if he’d had the PASIV legitimately, his body would have been cremated, his flat demolished, and the PASIV re-appropriated before you had the opportunity to involve yourselves.”

“There’s not much of him to cremate or didn’t Tony tell you about how he died?”

It was petty and stupid and the sort of rookie mistake Gibbs hadn’t made since his days starting out under Mike but the image of Eames and Tony together was pushing all his buttons and just how long had this shit been going on anyway?

Eames read every single word off Gibbs’ face like they’d been printed there.  He tilted his head to one side, eyes curious but unwavering. Gibbs knew that look. Hell, he’d used it himself thousands of times. It just didn’t belong on the face of the man who’d been screwing Tony behind his back. 

Gibbs tried unsuccessfully to stuff _that_ thought back wherever the hell it had come from.

“If you’re recording this, you may want to stop.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Fine. For the sake of posterity, then.” Eames leaned across the table. “I didn’t come here to help you with your relationship issues, Agent Gibbs. You’ll have to talk to Anthony if you want the sordid details. Frankly, I have no idea what game you two have been playing and regret getting even tangentially involved in it. Just know that whatever sex there was ended a long time ago – ”

“Didn’t look like it from where I was standing –”

“ – And I was never more than a poor substitute for you anyway.”

Not helping at all. In fact, if that was the sort of help Eames had come to offer ….

“I think we’re done here,” Gibbs said, picking up the folder and standing, brain still stuck echoing the word ‘substitute’ in his head.

“I set up a meet with Wells’ partner.”

“Tony’s already told me all about that.”

“Yes, he isn’t very good at keeping secrets from you, is he? Well, you aren’t going to manage that meet without me.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“His partner is expecting Arthur. You wouldn’t even know where to begin. Arthur isn’t the sort of person you can Google for background.”

“Not. Gonna. Happen.”

Eames stared at him with an intensity Gibbs grudgingly admired. When he spoke, his tone remained casual, even careless, but everything else about the man was sharper and somehow _honest_ for once, so Gibbs waited.

“I don’t expect you to understand what I do in the dreamscape, Agent Gibbs. Few individuals I work with understand it. Simply accept that I copy people; forge them, if you will. Down to the way your hair curls at the back of your head despite that dreadful haircut. And forging people hinges entirely on finding that first kernel of commonality, that one thing that binds you together as human beings regardless of gender, race, nationality, or political leanings.”

“You and I have nothing in common.”

 _Except Tony._

Eames smiled sadly.

“We haven’t much in common, no. But there is still a commonality. A powerful one, in fact. I’m tired of losing the people I love, too, Agent Gibbs. That, more than any other single thing, is why you need to let me help you.”

Gibbs stared ahead at nothing and swallowed hard. Somehow, Eames’ little speech made him feel like a fool about Tony, like he’d missed something important. When Gibbs finally managed to speak around the lump in his throat, his voice was harsh.

“That’s all you want out of this deal?”

Eames shifted back in his chair and, just like that, shrugged back on layers upon layers of subterfuge, guile, and flat-out lies like a well-worn coat.

“Well, amnesty would be nice.”

And Gibbs wouldn’t mind having the last ten years of his life back to do over. Leon Vance had about as much to do with both.

“Our director will never sign off on that.”

“Then I’ll take your word.”

Gibbs stared sharply at Eames before deciding that that game was pointless. He could stare at Eames all day long and he’d never learn more than what the man wanted him to know. The man was a mirror. In the end, Gibbs had only ever had the one answer to give anyway.

“You have my word,” he finally said. “But when this is done, so’s your relationship with Tony.”

Eames just smiled back.

♥

Arthur hated connecting flights. Planes going up. Planes going down. Flying first class didn’t stop weird things from happening to his inner ear either, which made it a fucking job hazard, to be honest. Plus he hated wading through the inevitably miserable press of people huddled together on the intra-terminal transport. He’d only booked the flight, despite its two connecting stops, because it was the fastest way to D.C. from Istanbul. At least it would have been before Frankfurt closed for bad weather. Arthur stared up at the Munich Airport arrival and departure board and tried to dredge up some gratitude that his flight had been diverted before Frankfurt International declared war on air travel. It was an uphill battle. His exit options from Munich were abysmal.

Helsinki, for fuck’s sake. Was that closer to or farther from Eames in the overall scheme of things?

In the end, anything that involved moving was closer to Eames than standing in Munich with his thumb up his ass. Arthur booked the ticket to Helsinki then dialed Trent’s number from memory as he stood in the boarding area.

“Arthur,” Trent purred. “Call to offer your condolences?”

“What for?  You still have the other eye.”

“Sympathy always was the cornerstone of your character. How did you hear?”

“It’s a small world. Of all people, you should know that. I need information.”

“Try the Internet.”

Arthur laughed, unimpressed. “There’s money involved. Might go a long way to helping you get that glass eye.”

“Is this your version of being persuasive, Arthur?”

“It’s my version of asking a fucking question, Kort. Are you picking up or passing? I have other people on this list to get to.”

Trent kept silent long enough for Arthur to make out the cry of a muezzin in the background. 

“Wire it to the usual,” he said finally. “What’s the question?”

“Mitchell Wells.”

Trent snorted. “Waste of time.”

“Yeah, and a dead one at that,” Arthur agreed. “But the waste of time was involved in PASIV research in D.C. Who’s running it?”

“The entire project was buried, Arthur. You know that. You helped to bury it.”

“Well, if everything always stayed buried, you’d be unemployed.”

“Too true.” Another pause. “Officially, he was a test subject in the government’s most recent go-around with dreamscape technology. Rumor was that he and several others in the project were trying to sell the upgraded PASIVs, claiming that their device, in combination with their particular Somnacin blend, would allow you to dial into a mark’s subconscious without having to physically attach him to a device.”

Arthur grunted. He should have let Wells talk more before hanging up. 

“Who were his partners?”

“I haven’t heard. Wells was the front man. How did you find out he was dead?”

“I quit the company, Kort, I didn’t contract amnesia. I _listened_.”

“Well, if he met his maker in D.C., once they identified him as a SEAL, NCIS would have been called. I’m betting Gibbs’ team would be the one to take the case, if not by luck then certainly once someone found all those vials and machinery.”

NCIS meant the Navy Yard. At this point, with Wells gone, the Navy Yard meant Eames.

“Tell me about Gibbs.”

Trent laughed. “How much time do you have? No point to it anyway. The man won’t be leveraged, trust me, and I’ve been in a better position to do it than most.”

Overhead, the first boarding call for Helsinki rang out. That meant he probably had another fifteen minutes, twenty tops. Arthur tightened his grip on the phone and prepared to wait Trent out.

“You know I know better than to trust you, Kort. Besides, this is my dime. Tell me about Gibbs.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NCIS and the boys from Inception meet over a PASIV device and a dead Navy SEAL. This round, Arthur and Gibbs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to lonetread for the terrific beta work.

Gibbs would have preferred to just do his job but he knew better than to proceed with an op, especially one that promised to be this fucked up, without at least trying to warn Leon Vance. Unfortunately, per his administrative assistant, the director was out of the office for the rest of the day at some never-ending high-security meeting across town. Gibbs would have liked to just call the man, something quick and private that he could hang up on when Leon started shouting. Thanks to modern technology, however, he wound up standing in MTAC with a headset pressed to one ear and half of NCIS listening in.

On the big screen, Leon gnawed on his toothpick and reread Gibbs’ report for the hundredth time. God only knew what the man thought would change with his next reread. He’d been scanning it for almost five minutes now and his frown just kept getting deeper.

“Just so I’m clear on this, Gibbs,” Leon finally said and Gibbs considered hanging up already; nothing good in his life had ever started with that statement. “Your agent recognized – from personal use – the phone number of a possible international felon, contacted him, and informed him of the details of your case before smuggling him into the Navy Yard so he could compromise your evidence. And now you want to include that possible felon in your op tonight as – what, exactly? Bait?”

“He volunteered, Leon.”

And they were running out of leads.

“What about DiNozzo?”

Gibbs shrugged. Leon made it sound like this would be the first time Tony ever walked the tightrope between fucking something up beyond all belief and saving the day. Gibbs still dreamt of Tony in Bethesda’s isolation ward from time to time, warming under blue lights like some all-you-can-eat buffet leftover, looking so close to death that Gibbs had had to touch him to make sure he was still breathing. He still remembered the pain of walking away, too, every step a race against the pulling, twisting, near-overwhelming need to crawl into bed with the man and just hold on. Instead, he’d tapped Tony on the head, left him his cell phone, and pretended that he was merely the man’s boss, that he hadn’t held two men at gunpoint and yelled at Abby for the first time ever because he’d finally realized he was in love- not simply lust – with his very male co-worker.

“What about Well’s bank records? Didn’t you say you were having McGee pull them back up to look at some discrepancies?”

“Wiped clean.”

Before the Black Death, there had been that time Gibbs had gone picking through the sewers with panic racing through his veins because some Marine’s lunatic ex-girlfriend had manacled Tony to a pipe. He’d never been so glad to see another person in his life. Tony, all grins and happiness because he’d managed to get free with that two-inch belt knife Gibbs had gotten him as a damn joke. That had been a close one, too – the temptation to slap the man repeatedly across the head vying with the much more deadly temptation to take him home, wash him up, and fuck him until they both forgot their names.

“Not too many people could manage that,” Leon said, breaking up the half-formed fantasy into shards of sharp need.

“No.”

“Just thinking about who in Washington has the kind of clout to okay a project in military dream-sharing is giving me ulcers, Gibbs.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say to that so Gibbs said nothing. Leon glanced down at his report one more time, the frown now a permanent feature.

Watching Tony’s car blow up live in MTAC had been the hands-down worst, though. The waves of failure, loss, and helplessness churning in his gut had brought the nightmare of losing Shannon and Kelly screaming back to life – only worse because he’d been older by then, long broken and keenly aware of what it meant to be alone. He remembered walking onto the scene to stare at the charred body inside the skeleton of a car and struggling to imagine Tony gone – truly gone – sacrificed on Jenny’s altar of pointless revenge. No more annoying movie quotes. No more steak dinners with that god-awful microbrewery crap he kept bringing over. No one left to poke at Gibbs through his bad moods and worse temper. No one left who got him.

“How do you find these, Gibbs?”

“They find me, Leon.”

“So you say.”

Leon reached for something outside the camera’s immediate line of sight. Hopefully a pen. To either sign off on their op or stab Gibbs in the eye and put him out of his misery already. He was half-hard again, ramped up on memories of Tony’s near-death experiences, which they both remembered, and Gibbs’ fantasies, which only Gibbs remembered. In vivid 3D. Despite the chilly air-conditioning in MTAC, Gibbs could feel himself flush.

He would have to bench Tony. Maybe there had been a time in the past when he was either younger and stronger or just plain old dumber and concentrating on _not_ concentrating on Tony wouldn’t have meant being too damn distracted to do his job. But here and now, with the knowledge that the man might be more bent than straight burning a hole in his head, Gibbs knew he’d have a better chance of surviving this mess with Tony safe at home and pissed off at him than standing at Eames’ side. He could take the endless parade of women, real and imagined. He’d survived Jeanne Benoit, Paula Cassidy, E.J. – even that shit with Ziva, whatever that had been. But if Gibbs didn’t get Eames out of D.C. on the next flight back to bumfuck wherever, he was definitely going to shoot somebody.

On the big screen, Leon finally looked up, his complexion green like he’d eaten bad seafood. Or maybe it was the lighting in MTAC.

“Just tell me this has nothing to do with you and DiNozzo,” the other man said.

Gibbs’ thoughts scattered like rabbits as he struggled to separate internal monologue from external conversation.

“Director?”

“Don’t give me that blank stare, Gibbs. I’m too damn tired to keep up the act right now.”

The bunnies were definitely long gone. Gibbs scowled. He hated feeling caught off-guard.

“What act?”

“Act, Gibbs. Like that little dog-and-pony show you and DiNozzo put on for your team and the entire damn bullpen every working minute of your lives.” Leon squinted at him and sighed heavily. “I suppose it fools most of them – which doesn’t say great things about our investigative skills but, hell, you two even fooled me – for about a year. You do realize DADT has been rescinded? If it ever applied to our agency to begin with.”

Gibbs’ defense would always be a strong offense. He’d been that way even before the Marines got their hands on him. So he forced the words past numb lips, only too aware of all the heads swiveling to stare at him.

“Are you trying to say you think there’s something _romantic_ going on between me and DiNozzo, Leon?”

A low wave of embarrassed, disbelieving chuckles rippled through MTAC like a warm breeze. Knowing that other people found the idea of him and Tony together laughable wasn’t exactly making Gibbs’ day but maybe he’d needed the reality check. So what if Tony dated men now and then? That didn’t mean he had any interest in dating Gibbs. Too old. Too sour. Too much damn time gone by.

If some part of him refused to recognize reality biting him in the ass, Gibbs ignored it.

Besides, he’d worked hard over the years at not being obvious about his obsession with Tony. At one point or another,  
Gibbs had given up everything from head slaps to talking to Tony – hell, even looking at the man when the need got too bad. Leon was just guessing.

Out loud.

In the middle of MTAC.

God fucking damn it.

“No, I don’t think there’s anything romantic going on between the two of you. If there were, I’d be sleeping better. Look, Gibbs. I can’t believe I’m about to offer you relationship advice—”

“So don’t,” Gibbs growled but it was like trying to stop the Titanic.

“Three divorces and your recent so-called attempts at dating seem to suggest you need this sort of thing pointed out to you, however. That boy has been gone on you since day one. The fact that he might have wandered off on the preserve now and then doesn’t mean he’s any less devoted to you. That is not to say that I understand any of it because I don’t. No offense, Gibbs, but I wouldn’t date you if someone held a gun to my head.”

“Good to know, director,” Gibbs said dryly. Especially good to know that his own choice in sexual partners hadn’t come into question at all, just Tony’s. Very nice.

Now that it no longer mattered, Leon finally stopped talking. The damage had been done. Gibbs could feel eyes picking him off from the darkest corners of MTAC. He had to get Tony out of the building before he got wind of this or the man would want to talk about it and Gibbs’ day would go from bad to apocalyptic. For the moment, he took refuge in that old familiar stand-by: work. He still had an op to run.

“I’ll give you a head’s up when we launch surveillance for the night.”

Gibbs turned to cut the connection but, of course, Leon was determined to have the last word. Setting his pen aside, he looked up, staring at Gibbs with hard eyes.

“Just don’t fuck this up out of jealousy, Gibbs. Terrifying as it may sound to the rest of us, DiNozzo is probably your last chance at rejoining humanity.”

Then the big screen went blank – about five minutes too late.

♦

Arthur knew he’d lived through worse days in the past. The specifics just weren’t springing to mind at the moment. To begin with, any flight out of Helsinki with an open seat had been apparently duty-bound to head back to Frankfurt or Munich. With his internal clock counting down travel time to D.C. and Eames in steadily escalating decibels of panic, Arthur had had to settle for shanghaiing an intoxicated Greek tourist in the men’s room of the British Air courtesy lounge and appropriating what was probably the last trans-Atlantic ticket left in the terminal. Then, he’d landed in D.C. only to discover the city enjoying its first white-out of the season. Hearing people tell him repeatedly how lucky he was to have landed at all did not improve his mood. Finally, he’d only just pulled his newly rented roller-skate out of its parking spot when his phone suddenly went crazy with the text messaging. By the time Arthur managed to stop the hysterical beeping, he was halfway into a three-sixty spin-out on the D.C. beltway. Fortunately, the road was deserted because sensible people with reasonable jobs were home with fuzzy socks on their feet and hot chocolate in their mugs, not chasing halfway around the globe after errant boyfriends. He pulled the car to a stop before it rolled into the ditch and stared at his phone.

Arthur hated text messages. No one ever spelled for shit in them with the end result being twice as much effort for half the payback. He would have cancelled the service except that some people (Dom) preferred texting to talking and tended to text him with anything from the mundane ( _need recipe 4 meatloaf_ ) to the bizarre ( _shot need exit rte Budapest pls_ ). Those examples might have been reversed. Either way, this time, Arthur glanced down and found himself catapulted into a twilight zone of alphabet soup.

 _McGee: drlg!ctnbut?4UF2F2nteWellsprtnrknowsu?_

Did he even know anyone named ‘McGee’?

No. But he knew someone named ‘Eames’.

Sighing, Arthur gave up on translating the mess and just called back.

“Where are you?” he asked when the ringing stopped.

“I think I’ll forego our usual variations on this theme just once,” Eames replied.

The vise around Arthur’s chest loosened and slid free as the distinctive and disturbingly familiar fuzzy-crisp syllables washed over him. He took his first deep breath since Istanbul. Not dead, thank fuck. Color started to bleed back into Arthur’s consciousness. Over the phone, Eames continued to talk, oblivious to Arthur’s sudden crisis of self-awareness.

“The gents outside the NCIS Autopsy Room, if you must know. Remarkable reception considering.”

“Yeah, terrific. Why haven’t you been answering my calls?”

“You have noticed that I’m not currently speaking to you on my mobile, yes? By the way, you may want to consider chucking yours after our little tête-à-tête – just in case smashing this thing to bits isn’t enough to stop the industrious Ms. Sciuto from resurrecting its call history.”

“I don’t even want to know. Is there a window in the men’s room?”

“I’m not crawling out a window, Arthur. Not at this juncture. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Is that what that was?”

Arthur knew it was petty but the sound of Eames’ teeth grinding down made him feel better.

“And?” Eames sounded constipated.

“And, unless you actually meant to text me illegible porn, you’re going to have to repeat your message – in English this time.”

“Mitchell Wells—”

“I know about Wells and his black market PASIV.”

“I have a meet-up with his partner in a few hours.”

“Mazel tov.” There had to be some reality in which Eames’ ideas sounded good, rather than suicidal.

“Not as me, naturally.”

“Naturally,” Arthur murmured dryly and shoved the rental back in gear.

Eames might still be breathing but they weren’t out of the woods yet. Not even close. Arthur yanked the car out of the ditch, keeping the phone pressed to one ear as he coaxed the piece of shit back up to twice the legal speed limit. He was never letting Eames out of his direct line of sight ever again. The man was a fucking menace.

“Any chance he might already have met you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve met lots of people, Eames, not being the social recluse you seem to like envisioning. Who is he?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. I’ve spoken with him before, though, possibly over the telephone. Sounded familiar but the details keep slipping past me.”

Arthur recognized the soft, distracted tone. Despite his well-practiced façade of indifference, Eames was actually a closet workaholic with ridiculous standards that generally amounted to perfection or nothing at all. He hated letting details get away from him. Sometimes, Arthur thought Eames lived life in its details – like Arthur, even if they preferred to focus on different details. Unfortunately, Arthur didn’t have the time at the moment to nurse Eames’ nagging obsession along as he usually did.

“That’s great, Eames. You do remember our usual caliber of colleague, right? Most of the people you talk to over the phone suffer from serious sociopathic tendencies while being only tenuously tethered to any sort of reality.”

“I don’t think it was Cobb.”

Arthur could hear the laughter curling just under the surface and fought back the answering smile, never mind that Eames couldn’t see him. The man didn’t need encouragement and there was still the issue of this oddball loyalty Arthur felt towards Dom, a gut-deep emotion that fell somewhere between indigestion and a hairball.

“I think we’re back to my question about a bathroom window.”

“I’ve never understood the American penchant for calling these places bathrooms—”

“Spare me the list of ex-pat grievances and answer the question.”

“There’s hardly a point, darling. Even if I did manage to contort my way through it, this is a federal facility and since I have yet to overcome my allergy to barbed wire and carelessly forgot credentials to get past – Arthur, where are you?”

Arthur laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“Is Gibbs the nut job who’s letting you keep this half-assed meeting? As what, exactly? Bait?”

“Delightful man. I’m only sorry I put off meeting him for this long,” Eames murmured, not answering the key question as usual. He didn’t sound surprised that Arthur knew Gibbs by name, either.

“He’s not delightful. He’s nothing close to delightful. Eames, listen to me. I know his kind.”

“I won’t ask how,” Eames said, tone thoughtful.

“You know how.” And, even though they had never discussed his patchy history of government employment, Arthur was absolutely sure that Eames did know; imagination was the man’s fucking signature calling card after all. “He’s a Marine sniper, Eames. There are no ex-Marine snipers. He’s used to huddling down in some desert death zone for months at a time, drinking his own piss from a tin can, and waiting for his target to sneak a peek out some god-forsaken mud hut best seen by satellite. He’ll throw you to the wolves if that’s what it takes to achieve his objective and still sleep like the dead.”

“Yes. Anthony’s stories – and his frustration – make excellent sense in retrospect.”

Jealousy flashed hot and painful in Arthur’s gut. Jesus, he was losing it. He wasn’t this sort of lover. He wouldn’t ask.

“Who the fuck is Anthony?” he asked.

“A failed stand-in for you, actually. Look, I’ll manage it somehow. I have to go.”

Somewhere, someone pounded on a door.

“Wait. Where’s the meeting?”

Eames laughed and the warm, outrageous charm of the man seeped through the phone like honey. Arthur’s grip tightened painfully on the steering wheel.

“Arthur, for all I know, you are already in the bloody city. I didn’t do this as some dramatically dysfunctional show of devotion. And, after all my recent pain and suffering—”

“ _Your_ recent pain and suffering?”

“—the last thing I intend to do now is aid and abet you in your attempt to throw yourself into the path of on-coming traffic.”

“But why—”

“I love you. I’ll call you after. I promise.”

The connection cut out then, leaving Arthur cursing dead air, his heart pounding in his ears. Typical.

♣

Tony had spent more years studying Gibbs than most people did to get a PhD, so the fact that he now wore an expression Tony had never seen before was more than a little worrisome. Also, if it had been anyone else, Tony would have said the man was trying not to look at him but this was Gibbs so that was ridiculous. The man could stare down cats.

Tight, thin set lips. Clenched jaw. Ice blue eyes locked on his monitor screen in some sort of life or death battle – over email probably. The man had forwarded his entire account to Tony. But bursting spectacularly from the proverbial closet at the fucking crack of dawn tended to lend a man a little reckless courage and Tony had already happily forwarded all Gibbs’ emails back to him.

Still, Gibbs had come down from MTAC looking like someone had just handed him a soy latte with extra sugar. Of course, it could be anger or frustration – but then, all Gibbs’ looks could be classed under those broad terms. Like a Rorschach, everything looked like a bat or a butterfly if you let it.

No, this look was definitely something new. And different. That couldn’t be good either. Gibbs wasn’t the poster boy for new and different. Gibbs stood for the steady, the routine – for getting to work at seven each morning and staying until the job got done, which was how Tony wound up with nearly thirty weeks of paid leave currently tagged to his name in H.R. but that wasn’t the point right now. The point right now was that they had less than six hours left to prep for their op and Gibbs was benching him.

“You’re not serious,” Tony blurted out, slumping back in his chair.

Gibbs didn’t bother looking up at him. “Do I look like I’m kidding, DiNozzo? Go home.”

“If this is because I didn’t tell you when I recognized Eames’ number – in my defense, you’d just told me to relocate to Florida. It didn’t seem like the moment.”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, I was going to tell you whatever Eames told me about the thingy in Abby’s lab just as soon as he told me … whatever he was going to tell me.” Tony frowned. That could have come out better.

Gibbs just shook his head.“You’ve messed up worse on a case before.”

That stung.

“I haven’t.”

“Have.”

“Haven’t.”

Gibbs looked up then, bright eyes definitely gleaming with annoyance. _Finally_. A look Tony recognized.

“What the hell are we arguing about?”

Tony took a deep breath and plunged in. Somehow, having Eames somewhere in the building, even if under McGee’s watchful eye, had inspired his brain to put years of the man’s annoyingly accurate advice on constant replay and made it easier for Tony to forego his usual song-and-dance camouflage for once, especially with Gibbs.

 _Do something, Anthony._

“Look, you can fire me after the case, okay? I’ll even fill out the paperwork – though there may be rules about issuing your own pink slip but whatever. McGee’s not up for graduating to being your sole team member _and_ your new senior field agent in the span of time it usually takes him to eat his lunch so you’re just going to have to live with the knowledge that not all the names in my little black book belong to 34DDs. It’s only for a few more hours anyway.”

At least, it would be if Tony had anything to do with it. He’d get the truth out of Wells’ partner at The Cage tonight even if he had to shoot the man in the kneecaps to do it. He didn’t have the nerves left for subtlety. They would need a search warrant for the premises. Was the place one-story or two? There might be offices. Better include any files they might find. What about subpoenas? Usually, he had Ziva take these things over to legal for signatures but maybe Probie—

He glanced up only when Gibbs slammed his palm onto Tony’s keyboard. He found the man towering over him and glaring, like an irate Godzilla over a doomed Tokyo.

“What part of ‘go home’ sounded like ‘you’re fired’ to you?”

Gibbs’ voice was soft and low, the kind of voice Tony had only ever heard him use with small kids, ex-lovers, and serial murderers. Tony wondered briefly which group Gibbs thought he currently belonged in.

“Aren’t you? Firing me, I mean.”

“You think I would fire you over who you sleep with?”

Tony shrugged.

“Aren’t you?” he repeated, plucking at Gibbs’ callused fingers where they pressed down on his keyboard, spewing garbage across the warrant request form. “And it’s ‘slept with’ as in distant prehistoric past. Now, do you mind? I have papers to file on a deadline and my boss doesn’t really tolerate excuses about missed deadlines.”

Gibbs didn’t move. “You really think I’m that kind of bastard?”

“Could you rephrase please? Maybe in a multiple choice format? Or ‘Jeopardy’? Alex, I’ll take Obvious Questions for four hundred.”

“Enough with the movie quotes.”

“‘Jeopardy’ is not a movie. I thought Jack got you cable for Christmas.”

“Just answer the damn question.”

“Fine then. Yes.”

Gibbs stood back, looking honestly stunned for the first time in Tony’s memory.

Some part of Tony’s brain, the part that liked to believe he was a trained investigator with an intimidating skill set and an intellect not to be fucked with, knew things were getting out of hand. He and Gibbs were all but shouting at each other and the rest of the bullpen had become as silent as a graveyard. Hell, footage of this little heart-to-heart of theirs would probably wind up on YouTube within the hour but even knowing that, he couldn’t seem to stop.

“Well, I’m not,” Gibbs told him, lips barely moving. “You could have told me.”

“Really? I’m telling you now and you’re benching me.”

“Not because of that.”

Tony stood and found himself nose to nose with Jethro Gibbs. He’d tried hard to avoid getting into this position over the years, not because he’d ever been intimidated by the man – not like poor Tim who’d had to stock extra underwear in his bottom drawer for his first six months on Team Gibbs – but because he could feel the singe and burn of those flame blue eyes only too well like this, because he could feel himself unravel and go just a little bit more insane each second he spent with Gibbs’ hot breath ghosting across his cheek, and, most of all, because he could still remember what it had felt like to have Gibbs twisting under him in that Baltimore back alley.

Tony was steadily losing the battle against the blinding need to have the man back in that position again.

“Then why?”

“God damn it, DiNozzo. Do you have to make everything complicated? Just go home.”

Gibbs’ voice had gone hoarse, eyes fixed on some point just over Tony’s left shoulder, when Tony stiffened, brain sizzling like he’d just been struck by lightning. The sudden, unbelievable knowledge that he might not be the only one unraveling here made Tony’s nerves sing. He breathed in the trademark scent of sawdust and coffee overlaid with something new – a glimmer of a promise – and felt his pants tighten to just the wrong side of comfortable.

 _Careful_. Ten years of pain and suffering, unacknowledged lust, miscommunication, and flat-out no communication were about to come into alignment here – like some sort of Mayan end-of-the-world calendar event.

He didn’t let himself look at Gibbs too closely most days – for obvious reasons – but Tony forced himself to take a long look now. Salt and pepper hair that was definitely more salty now than when they’d first met. Broad shoulders. Trim waist. Knobby knees that could still wipe him out in the boxing ring in under ten. Handsome in a don’t-fuck-with-me-I-will-hurt-you way, sure, but compared to E.J.? That perpetual scowl. The absence of any noticeable spoken language on most days. When had the idea of dating young, pretty women with soft skin and long, silky hair that didn’t look like it had been bushwhacked with a machete start to seem like a pallid fucking wasteland next to the thought of coming home to this?

Because it did. Tony wanted the right to come home to Gibbs like he wanted to keep breathing.

“Maybe it’s pheromonal,” Tony murmured.

Gibbs blinked at him.

“What?”

“Are you upset because I didn’t tell you? Or because the great Leroy Jethro Gibbs didn’t figure it out?”

Gibbs stared at him warily. “Ten years is a long time,” he finally said.

“Yes, it is. You could have mentioned something anywhere along the line in there.”

Those keen eyes sharpened, drew back, started to wall off again. Gibbs took a step back from Tony’s desk. Tony stepped around it and kept himself in Gibbs’ personal space. The chase was on, even if Tony had never thought he’d be the one chasing down Gibbs. Somehow, his fantasies had always featured the man knocking on his front door having miraculously come to his senses. Preferably bearing pizza.

“Nothing to say,” Gibbs muttered.

Tony smiled and shook his head, took another step forward. Of course, Gibbs stubbornly refused to take another step back. Sign of weakness. Well, Tony hadn’t survived as the man’s Senior Agent by _not_ learning how to use those little character quirks to his advantage.

“See, I don’t think that’s true. I think that if I’d been paying a little more attention, I might have enjoyed the longest courtship in the history of Man more than I actually did.”

Gibbs snorted. “You think I’ve been courting you?”

“No. I think _you_ think you’ve been courting me. My fault. All those mandatory sexual harassment seminars should have clued me in. Has any other team had to attend as many of those as we have?”

“Tony, don’t.”

The look in Gibbs’ eyes was probably the closest the man would ever get to begging and the sound of his name on Gibbs’ lips, almost a lover’s whisper, was like a drug. Instantly addicting. If they’d been doing this dance for anything less than a decade, Tony might have relented. As it was, he just leaned in closer.

“Enough games, Jethro.” Tony tasted the name and, for the first time, realized that it fit the man after all. “The head slaps, the snarling, the coffee addiction. _Trying to move me to Florida_. Not that it hasn’t been lots of fun, but maybe we could try something a little different.”

Gibbs stared at him, unblinking, for a long moment. When he finally smiled back, it was full of teeth.

 _Be careful what you wish for._

“You’d better be sure about this.”

“Do I look unsure about something?”

“Because there’s no going back. Not with this. Us.”

Tony sobered, felt suddenly lightheaded. “That’s probably been true for awhile, don’t you think?”

“I think you don’t have clue number one as to where you’re taking things.”

“Winging things successfully is kinda my trademark, don’t you think, Boss?”

“So’s winging things badly. And don’t call me ‘Boss’. Not now. So, something different?”

Gibbs leaned forward, almost purring now. Their eyes locked with their lips millimeters apart. This was a new Gibbs, one whose every word seemed steeped in sexual innuendo, and Tony couldn’t help laughing, half nerves and half adrenaline-fueled delirium. This was really happening. Jethro Gibbs was _flirting_ with him.

“Well, don’t break out the hand cuffs or anything.”

“Something more direct, maybe.”

“Jesus, Jethro. Only you could make an assertion of undying love and devotion sound like a declaration of war.”

“Which are you declaring?”

Tony felt like he was standing in the middle of a hurricane, only a thin film of illusory calm separating him from getting torn to bits by the force of nature that was Jethro Gibbs. He managed a casual shrug he didn’t feel.

“You know what they say. If you have to ask—”

Jethro’s eyes slid to his mouth. Tony stopped talking then, stopped breathing, stopped even thinking because any second now the man was going to do the impossible and kiss him in the middle of the fucking bullpen, in front of god and a shitload of federal security cameras. Just imagining it had Tony scrambling for his tattered self-control. No way was he coming in his pants at work. Not even for Jethro.

They were in the middle of the bullpen.

They really, really needed to separate now.

He’d have an easier time sawing off his own arm than stepping away from Jethro Gibbs.

Sexual frustration and shredded sanity raged at each other in Tony’s brain like an out of control forest fire, wiping out everything else, all of which ultimately translated into some seriously conflicted feelings when Tim exploded out of the back elevators waving a piece of paper at them like he’d just won the lottery. At the same time, the front elevators slid open to disgorge two of the front gate guards and a slim man in a dark three-piece suit.

Great. A visitor. FBI or CIA by the look of him. Probably CIA. FBI types never thought to spring for Zegna.

Tim reached them first, too flushed with success to take in the fact that Tony was a blink away from humping their boss like a deranged dog. Next to him, Jethro took a deep breath and Tony could feel the layers of armor slam back into place. _Fucking hell_. He’d have to take up knitting as a stress reliever if they were going to keep this up for another decade.

“Boss! I cross-checked the calls on Eames’ phone with the switchboard records and the calls we identified on Wells’ phone. The common number traces back to Captain Turner, his C.O.”

“Why are you up here, McGee?” Icicles hung from Gibbs’ every syllable.

Tim stopped, face blank. “You said you needed the numbers cross-checked ASAP—”

Tony groaned. “That’s why they invented phones, Probie. You were supposed to watch Eames.”

“I _was_ watching him.”

“Well, you’re sure as hell not watching him now!” Gibbs snapped, reaching in his drawer for his Sig. “Where’s Eames?”

Tony was already halfway to the back elevators when the suit started laughing. Gibbs stopped to study their visitor through narrowed eyes.

“You have no idea how hopeless a question that is,” the man said, dark eyes gleaming. “You’re Gibbs?”

Gibbs didn’t bother answering the question. “Who are you?”

The suit smiled a dimpled smile that made him look all of twelve and, just like that, the air in the bullpen seemed to suddenly thin and evaporate. Tony felt his stomach drop, went for his weapon on reflex, and found the shoulder holster empty. The fucking gun was back at his desk – it might as well be in Tibet. This – whatever this was – would be over before he could reach it.

There was nothing standing between Gibbs and this maniac. Tony didn’t count the guards; something about the suit screamed that two middle-aged, slightly over-weight uniformed men, even armed, would never stop him. One of them made a last-minute, futile grab at redemption anyway.

“He said you were expecting him, Agent Gibbs,” the guard said.

“He is. I’m Arthur,” the suit said simply. “And this is for thinking you could use Eames as bait.”

His fist caught Gibbs in the jaw with enough force to send Gibbs skidding over his desk, which counted as an unfortunate first. Gibbs straightened up almost immediately, though, eyes flashing blue fire. Needless to say, he hit back.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NCIS meets Inception over a PASIV device and a dead Navy SEAL. The one where I finally stop with the cliffhangers (mostly) and they start having sex (enough that I felt I had to up the rating anyway).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried and I lied. There is no way for me to finish this up in one chapter so this is not the end. Thanks to Kesterpan for the idea of the bet, which I have shamelessly borrowed from her FIO-verse work, and lj user animesiren for the inspiration for the scene with Eames and Arthur. And, for anyone who wondered, this was exactly why Ziva had to take a vacation from the get-go; Ziva vs. Arthur is beyond me. As always, thanks to lj user lonetread for the patient beta work.

  
Tim McGee stared at his computer screen in horror. When the brief clip ended abruptly, he hit replay without really thinking about it, hooked even though he’d seen the whole thing live. The hit counter had already reached six digits. This was a nightmare. Who could have done this? Who _would_ have done this? More to the point, how was he going to _undo_ this? He sat, frozen and enthralled, until Ziva started shouting in his ear again.

“McGee? McGee! Answer me. Is Gibbs okay?”

Balancing his phone on his shoulder (desk phone, not cell, since Eames had smashed his cell to pieces before flushing it down the toilet), Tim started typing. He’d hacked the Pentagon, after all. How hard could it be to get one two-minute video clip off YouTube?

“McGee?!”

He didn’t mean to ignore her. It’s just that hacking wasn’t really the casual afterthought his teammates seemed to think.

“I am catching the next plane to Washington,” she told him firmly.

That did it. Tim stopped typing.

“No, wait. Ziva, listen to me. We’re fine. I know it looks bad—”

“Looks bad? McGee, the man threw Gibbs on his own desk!”

“I know.”

“And then hit him in the head!”

Tim winced. “Yeah, I know, Ziva. I was there.”

“Then why did you not stop it?!”

“It all happened really fast.”

“Not _that_ fast. This video goes on for two minutes!”

“Well, the beginning’s the worst. It gets better after that.” He sounded like an idiot but he couldn’t stop himself. It _had_ felt a teeny tiny bit like having a ring-side seat at WWF – except for the knowledge that no one had been play-acting and the fact that the blood had been very, very real. “See! Right there. The boss got in three solid punches, started a nosebleed.”

Apparently, that didn’t help convince Ziva he was firing on all cylinders either.

“I cannot believe I am asking this but where is Tony?”

“Down in Abby’s lab. Arthur needed ice for the nosebleed.”

“‘Arthur’?! We are on a first name basis with this man now?”

“Ziva,” Tim sighed. “How did you find this clip anyway?”

“Ray was trying to show me the video of the vacuuming cat.”

Tim opened his mouth then reconsidered. At this point in her travels through the English language, it was entirely possible that Ziva actually meant ‘vacuuming cat’ but—

“McGee!”

“Look, I’ll get the clip taken down. Gibbs is fine.” ‘Fine’ might have been over-stating things a little bit. The boss had had to limp his way to the elevator after the main event, after all. “Ducky’s putting in a couple of stitches—”

“‘Stitches’ does not sound fine, McGee,” Ziva snapped.

Tim blazed on anyway. “And Arthur is going to help us with the op tonight just as soon as we can stop the bleeding.”

“But who is he?”

“Uh – that’s taking a little more time to answer than I expected.”

Tim went back to typing through all the multi-lingual cursing.

“The next flight, McGee. I will be on the very next flight. I knew it was a mistake to take a vacation.”

“Ziva, no – wait. We’re fine. Really.”

“So you keep saying, McGee. But I do not see that you are ‘fine’ at all.”

In the end, visions of Ziva and this Arthur person going ten rounds in Abby’s lab inspired Tim to at least throw her a bone. Miami was a long way away, after all.

“Well, I did kinda find Tony and Gibbs in a little bit of a hinky situation before all this happened.”

“What sort of hinky situation?” Ziva demanded, immediately distracted.

Never mind that office gossip had her and Tony picking out china patterns every weekend, they’d had a running bet of their own for years, and Tim couldn’t help feeling a little eager to share the news, especially when he stood a decent chance of now winning said bet.

“Well, I’d just run the cross-check on the phone numbers—”

“The point, McGee.”

Tim rolled his eyes. He loved his job. He really did. He just wished the people he worked with would cultivate a little more patience now and then.

“They were practically making out in the bullpen.”

Silence.

“Ziva?”

“Define ‘practically’. And why did our mystery cameraman not post _that_ video clip instead of this one?”

Good point. Tim made a mental note to run a search for the footage.

“They were breathing all over each other and Gibbs had Tony bent backwards over his desk like they were about to – well, they looked like the cover of one of those romance novels you like to read.”

“ _That_ does not constitute winning the bet, McGee. We agreed they would have to ‘get together’.”

“Well, I didn’t realize you meant they’d have to actually – you know, do the deed, for ‘get together’ to have officially occurred,” Tim whispered into the phone, glancing around the bullpen as casually as he could manage. This was not the sort of conversation he felt safe having here, especially not after the day’s events. “Besides, that would be impossible to prove. I vote for amending the bet. If I can get footage of them from this afternoon—”

“We would have to agree that they were indeed about to kiss, not simply that Gibbs was about to slap Tony around the head and shoulders again.”

The two events could be hard to distinguish. Tim had to give her that much.

“Okay. Fine. But if we agree, then I win the bet. Deal?”

“Perhaps. And McGee? The next flight to Washington leaves in an hour.”

Tim consoled himself with the knowledge that Ziva hanging up at least left him both hands to work with and went back to hacking YouTube.

♠

“Have you ever considered receiving your medical care someplace other than an autopsy bay, Jethro?” Ducky asked, frowning as he dabbed cold disinfectant all over Gibbs’ forehead.

Gibbs stared up at the bright white lights of Autopsy and wondered if this would be what death felt like. A harsh light in his eyes. A cold, hard table against his back. The sharp bite of antiseptic cleanser stinging his nostrils. Judging from the aches and pains now announcing themselves all over his damn body, death wasn’t too far off anyhow. Leon would probably be happy to serve up the final blow when he got back from his meeting.

He’d gotten into a fist fight in the middle of the bullpen. Just how the hell had that happened? This thing with Tony was making him lose his mind. He still couldn’t decide whether nearly kissing Tony in the middle of work or picking a fight with ex-Black Ops had been the poorer idea. Of course, there had been a time when he could have taken down a man like Arthur in under a minute, jujitsu or no jujitsu. Now – well, the kindest thing would be to call it a draw. Gibbs scowled. Feeling his age felt like shit.

“Stop moving.”

“Well, stop poking me in the eye,” Gibbs complained. “You’re flushing the damn thing again? Isn’t three times plenty?”

“You came here to receive medical advice, not give it. Irrigating a wound is essential to remove all possible foreign debris and limit the risk of infection.” The older man sat back on his stool with a frustrated sigh, gloved hands reaching for a syringe. “And, in a lesser man, I would consider that a whine.”

Gibbs eyed the syringe suspiciously as Ducky dipped it in the wash basin and pulled up an ocean of saline before squirting it into the gash in Gibbs’ head. Icy water ran across his forehead, along his scalp line, and down his neck. He could feel his polo soak the stuff up like a sponge, extending the arctic freeze to the rest of his back. Great. He sat up.

“Can’t you just stitch it up already? I still have a case to solve here.”

“Your case will have to wait. Now, lie back.” The M.E. clamped a needle holder onto the suture needle and pushed Gibbs back down on the autopsy table. “As the dead rarely feel any physical discomfort, I haven’t any local anesthetic but I assume that will not prove problematic for a man of your vast combat experience.”

“Duck—”

Too late. The first bite of the needle had Gibbs hissing through his teeth. It didn’t help that Arthur’s punch had broken skin right at his brow. Every stitch felt like a stab into his eyeball.

“On the plus side, it should heal nicely,” Ducky told him, doing that weird mind-reading thing that came from two people knowing each other just too damn long. “The scar should barely be visible once this heals.”

“That was my big worry, too.”

“Jethro,” Ducky reprimanded gently, never pausing in his work. “Do you know how they stitch up similar wounds in children when they present to the Emergency Department, young faces stained with fresh tears from their latest misadventure?”

“You offering me candy, Duck?”

“I was thinking more about distracting stories.”

“You’re gonna tell me a story?”

“No, _you_ are going to tell _me_ one. I’ll start you off, shall I? Once upon a time, an irascible NCIS agent hired a young policeman to work as his partner.”

“‘Irascible’? Am I gonna need a dictionary for this?”

“You’re hardly an uneducated idiot, Jethro. Why play one? You’re going to have to talk to someone about it eventually. It might as well be me.”

“Does now really seem like the time?”

Ducky smiled, unimpressed by his weak evasive tactics. “Why not? I so rarely have you as a captive audience.”

Gibbs closed his eyes and fought the urge to roll his neck as muscles tightened all over the place. Dunking his head in ice water then having heart-to-heart conversations tended to do that to him.

“There’s no story to tell, Ducky. I hired him. He’s a good agent.”

“Whom you very nearly kissed in public this afternoon.”

It was nice to know that he and Tony were already number one at the water-cooler box office. He’d hate to have suffered through all these years of sexual frustration and emotional turmoil only to win second place.

“You must have known they would already be talking about it, Jethro,” Ducky went on when he kept silent. “I understand the bullpen was very nearly at capacity when you two decided to finally have your long-awaited chat.”

“‘Long-awaited’?” Gibbs opened his uninjured eye to glare at his oldest friend. “Just who’s been awaiting?”

Ducky shrugged. “Everybody, I imagine. You’ve hardly been subtle.”

“Everybody’s been running around thinking I want in my senior agent’s pants,” Gibbs said flatly.

“Well, perhaps not _you_ , since I believe I am the only one here to have had the honor of attending your last bachelor party. But Anthony’s interest has been clear and went a long way to explaining why he hadn’t yet left.”

 _Like everyone else_ went unsaid.

“Stan was promoted.”

“As was Anthony, I believe, or wasn’t the Agent Afloat posting considered an advancement that time?”

 _Agent Afloat_. The words brought back unpleasant memories of his last team review with Leon. Gibbs scowled. Well, the man had said he wanted to talk – a completely overrated activity as far as Gibbs was concerned.

“Leon said the same thing – right before he told me I was holding Tony back and fostering co-dependency.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday. Offered to keep the Jacksonville position open until I could talk to Tony about it.”

Ducky stopped stitching. “You’re moving Anthony to Florida?”

“I _tried _to move Anthony to Florida,” Gibbs corrected with a sour smile. “Anthony ain’t going to Florida. Apparently, he’s decided he doesn’t like warm weather and beaches after all.”__

“Are you surprised? The boy’s been in love with you for a very long time, Jethro.”

“He’s not a boy.” _And he’s not in love with me._ Gibbs swallowed hard. “And Leon was right. They promoted him and I yanked him back here because he makes doing this job easier for me. I was being selfish."

“You don’t honestly believe that.”

Gibbs barked a harsh laugh. “And you don’t really believe that we’re some sort of great, long-lost, love affair, do you? I mean, neither one of us has exactly been living a life of celibacy these past ten years, Duck. He had that thing with Benoit – which felt pretty damn real, undercover or not – and you remember Hollis Mann, right?”

Ducky nodded absently and tied off his last suture.

“Yes. As well as Colonel Bell’s handsome legal henchwoman, if I’m not mistaken. Have you ever read ‘Waiting for Godot’, Jethro?”

Gibbs didn’t even flinch at the abrupt changes in topic anymore.

“Can we stop talking about this if I promise to pick up a copy on my way home?”

“I’ll save you the trouble with a pithy synopsis.” The M.E. stepped back to admire his work.

“Ducky—”

“Well, pithy for me anyway. _They passed the time_ , Jethro. I notice you have not denied the fact that you do indeed love Tony.”

Just hearing the words coming out of someone else’s mouth hurt. Gibbs sighed, ran one fingertip over the fuzzy line of stitches over his eyebrow.

“Doesn’t matter. Eventually, they all leave, Duck.” Even Shannon, if he wanted to be brutally honest about it.

“Perhaps. Or, perhaps, you would do better to actually talk to Anthony about your issues rather than take your aggressions out on men half your age.” Ducky tugged off his latex gloves with a snap. “As your tetanus is up-to-date, my work here is done. You are free to go about your business, hopefully while incurring less physical damage in the future. I’ll call some antibiotics into your pharmacy.”

Gibbs sat up with a groan. Everything felt stiff and sore and about a hundred years old.

“Half my age? That’s a little cruel, isn’t it? Besides, you should see the other guy.” He couldn’t help the trace of childish glee. He’d gotten in at least a couple of good hits for sure, hits hard enough to draw blood anyway, which he suspected didn’t happen too often to Arthur No-Last-Name-So-Sue-Me.

“I have. He’s holding ice to his head in Abby’s lab while rewriting your script for the evening’s operation, I believe.”

“God damn it!” Gibbs muttered, sliding the rest of the way off the autopsy table. “I should’ve cuffed the bastard when I had the chance.”

♣

“Your Arthur’s amazing,” Tony whispered in Eames’ ear.

Eames grunted and said nothing, kept his arms firmly folded across his chest as he watched Arthur diagram out their plans for the evening on Abby Sciuto’s computer. Yes, _his_ Arthur was, indeed, amazing. Not everybody could manage all that typing with one hand occupied holding a Ziploc baggy filled with ice to his nose.

“I think even McGoo is considering falling to his knees and worshipping at his feet in honour of the gods of logic and reason.”

“Lovely. Which of those had him trading punches with Gibbs, then?”

Tony looked at him and Eames decided he’d put this off long enough after all. He pushed away from the refrigerator and went to hover over Arthur’s shoulder.

“Would you like a fresh ice pack, darling?” he asked, interrupting Arthur’s presentation with a saccharin smile.

“No, thanks.” Arthur didn’t bother to glance at him. “As I was saying, security should actually be tightest around—”

“Because the one you’re currently holding is leaking like a sieve.”

“It’s fine.”

“Did you stab it with a knife or simply claw it to death in some secret kung fu handshake?”

Arthur finally stopped at that, took a deep breath, and turned to him.

“Are we doing this now? Alright then. Just spit it out.”

“Blasphemy. Tell me you don’t mean that, darling.”

Arthur blushed and scowled and cut to the chase. It was unfair, really, how the man undermined Eames’ every defence.

“Is the problem that you didn’t get to charge to my rescue? Because if that’s the case—”

“God forbid that the great Arthur require assistance in anything.”

“I didn’t need any help.”

“You weren’t about to purchase one of these devices, then? They weren’t soliciting your support at every turn. My concern was entirely misplaced and uncalled for.” Arthur’s mouth twitched and Eames smiled grimly. “Yes, that’s what I thought. Thank god it was on back order?”

“Something like that,” Arthur admitted grudgingly. “Wells sounded like a fucking telemarketer.”

“I never thought I’d be grateful for your ridiculously short fuse.”

Arthur glared at him, clearly torn between the innate need to defend his masculine honour and the fact that their ‘op’ loomed large on the horizon, offering little time for conversations that he considered extraneous and that Eames considered critical.

“I do not have a short fuse,” Arthur finally ground out, testosterone-fuelled insecurities winning out once more. He tossed the leaky ice pack into the rubbish bin by his side. “Fuck! There has to be a middle ground. Somewhere between Dom thinking I’m Superman and you thinking I’m Sleeping Beauty—”

“That’s rather self-aggrandising—”

“Just find the middle ground, Eames. Because I’m not losing you over this kind of shit.”

Another man would have been distracted by the compliment because – particularly coming from someone like Arthur – it was one hell of a compliment, but Eames stared back, unmoved.

“You were the one who said we shouldn’t work together.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind.” Arthur frowned. “Mostly.”

“How exciting. Will you text me when you’ve decided?”

“Wow. I don’t suppose you guys would consider videotaping the make-up sex?” Abby interrupted, shoving a fresh ice pack in Eames’ hand. “Because, right now, I hate to say it but we have more important things to do.”

Whether it was the camaraderie of a shared tattoo addiction or just Abby’s general demeanour, something in Eames uncoiled at the sound of her voice. He sighed heavily and ran one hand across his brow.

“No video. If it finished up on the Internet for free, I would have to kill myself over the fortune lost,” he told her before turning to Arthur and slapping the ice pack back on the man’s nose. Despite his every effort, Eames could feel his anger slipping through his fingers, replaced by the gut-wrenching relief of seeing Arthur again, annoying and whole and still relatively unharmed. “You simply walked in the front door and asked for Gibbs? Have I taught you nothing?”

“It worked.”

“After a fashion. Arthur, I don’t think ice is the miracle worker you were hoping for. This looks dreadful.”

Arthur laughed. “You should see the other guy.”

“Yes. So I’m given to understand, although I dimly remember someone once pointing out to me that there are no such things as ex-Marine snipers. Should I be grateful that Gibbs managed to retain enough of his faculties to resist starting an open exchange of gunfire in his office?”

“Eames—” Something disturbingly complicated flickered in Arthur’s eyes.

Eames stepped back and turned towards the plasma screen, certain only that he wasn’t ready to hear anything else from Arthur at the moment. Not more accusations and, most definitely, not an apology. Damage control was in place for now. They would have to sort the rest later.

“Abby, would you be so kind as to bring up your information on Captain Turner again?”

Turner’s information sheet replaced Arthur’s blueprints on the screen and Eames stared at the man. There was no help for it. Although the voice on the phone had sounded familiar enough, the face on the screen belonged to a stranger.

“The military should take these shots in something other than dress blues,” Tony complained. “Makes everyone look the same.”

“I don’t recognise him.”

“I think I do.” Arthur stepped up to the screen and squinted. “It’s in the mouth and nose.”

“What is?” Eames pressed.

“I don’t know. Something.”

“Arthur—”

Arthur scowled at him. “Okay. We all have our skills, right? I don’t see you memorising the layout of buildings at a single glance. We can’t all be fucking forgers, Eames.”

“The building is a warehouse, Arthur – a box with walls. Memorising where the exits are hardly poses a challenge.”

Arthur’s expression grew dark.

“So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying that most everyone has a mouth and a nose. A little more _specificity_ might be helpful.”

“Are you two always like this?” Tony asked, stepping between them and ignoring the dirty look Arthur shot him. “Because it’s really distracting. Abs, do we have anything on Turner’s family?”

“I think Timmy pulled up some stuff.” Abby frowned, hitched one booted heel on the table’s cross-bar, and typed with the rapid-fire rhythm of an AK-47. “Before you guys exiled him to the bullpen. It wasn’t his fault, you know. Eamsie here told us he needed to use the bathroom—”

“Unlikely,” Eames murmured.

“—and Palmer said he’d keep an eye on him. It couldn’t have been more than, like, five minutes and the cell phone thing was totally my fault—”

“Captain Turner’s family, Abs,” Tony prompted patiently. Clearly, the verbal diarrhoea and Russian roulette topic selection were well-known habits, not an idiosyncratic reaction to stress.

“Start with siblings,” a gruff voice said from the doorway.

The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees. Next to him, Tony stiffened and kept his eyes fixed on the plasma screen. Eames suffered from no similar restraint, however, and turned to watch Gibbs, battered but undaunted, navigate his way through the lab to where they stood.

Watching Arthur and Gibbs in the same room felt a bit like watching rabid terriers stroll past each other in a park. The risk of violence was palpable and merely continuing to breathe steadily felt more dangerous. The only hope was that their owners would keep a tight enough grip on their leashes to prevent death to any in the immediate zone of danger. Eames felt deeply troubled that he and Tony likely held those metaphorical leashes.

Blatantly disregarding all warning signs, Arthur stared at the line of sutures now decorating Gibbs’ brow and smirked. Gibbs stared pointedly at the ice pack Arthur still held to his oozing nose and smiled grimly. Blue eyes clashed with brown then slid away. Cold war indeed.

“We have an older sister and a younger brother,” Abby said calmly, amazingly unfazed by the threat in the air. A picture of a middle-aged woman with short, mousy hair appeared on the screen next to Turner’s profile. The resemblance was striking. “The sister lives in Kansas City, works at a bank. The brother—”

“Nash,” Arthur snapped when the next picture flashed up. “It’s fucking Nash.”

♠

A thousand years later, he and Eames were still arguing over their plans for the night. The only difference was that they now stood in a deserted orange nightmare of a workplace and Arthur had to simultaneously battle severe indigestion from some of the greasiest Thai food he’d ever had. He tossed the mostly full Styrofoam container in the trash and tried to regroup.

No one ever got to him like this. How Eames managed to still mystified him.

At least his nosebleed had stopped.

“I still say we should use the PASIV,” Eames insisted, taking a long drink from Arthur’s now nearly empty container of iced tea.

“I heard you the first hundred times.” In fact, Arthur would probably be hearing the refrain in his sleep. “How? It’s in pieces.”

“You could put it back together. Since you’re here.”

“Or not.”

“Do you guys ever actually finish a job you work on together?” Tony asked from his desk where he sat slumped over with his arms crossed defensively over his head. “Seriously, I think I’m going to need PTSD therapy. How long have we been talking about this?”

“Clearly not long enough if storming a nightclub en masse still seems like a good idea to you,” Eames shot back, picking off the rest of Tony’s pad thai.

Arthur watched him and concentrated on not moving. Eames ate when stressed. He finished off everybody’s food. It didn’t mean anything. It definitely wasn’t a sign that he should haul off and hit Tony.

“Putting the device back together may not be that easy,” McGee said with a frown. “Abby took off a couple of the needles to do blood-typing and a few yards of the tubing to analyze the solution – you know, before you told us how to access the vials. And I had to take the casing apart to try to access the main memory.”

All minor points but Arthur wasn’t about to say that. There were other, bigger problems with using Wells’ PASIV and Eames knew it.

“Your plan won’t work even if we somehow magically reassembled the PASIV,” he said instead. “Remote access dreaming is premised on the mark getting the necessary sedative cocktail prior to attempting remote hook-up and we don’t know where Nash is.”

“We know he’ll be at the Cage in little over an hour. I could slip him the sedative then,” Eames countered. “Though we should hurry before Ms. Sciuto burns through our remaining supply in the name of science.”

“Hey!” The woman poked Eames in the arm from her perch on McGee’s desk but it was the little pink skull-and-crossbones on her fingernails that got Arthur more than the physical contact. “I wouldn’t have had to if you’d just told us what it was from the beginning. Or at least identified Nash.”

“Well, I can’t help that I never met the lunatic in the flesh, can I, sweetheart?”

They grinned toothy grins at each other, and Arthur caught Tony and McGee exchanging a long look. Arthur silently agreed. A really odd, really frightening sort of chemistry was definitely developing between those two. If they kept it up, Arthur wouldn’t be able to decide if he should deck Tony or Abby or both.

God. He was really losing it over Eames. Not everyone in the room wanted to fuck the man and he wasn’t flirting with everyone he spoke to, but the disconnect between Arthur’s brain and gut was getting worse the longer this mess stretched out.

Behind him, he could hear Gibbs stir and start to stand. Apparently, it was time to rein in the natives. Arthur may not have liked working with military types on the whole but that didn’t mean he didn’t understand their rhythm. After all, it was the rhythm to his own madness.

Gibbs walked around his desk to stand beside Arthur.

“Talking to him was bad enough. You can’t Mickey Finn his drink,” he told Eames.

“Why not?” Eames looked insulted.

“Because he’ll shoot you if he catches you.” Arthur couldn’t believe he was actually supporting Gibbs in something but, then again, this was Eames they were talking about. “It’s a little more complicated than a game of Follow the Lady. Besides, you don’t think this crowd’s going to let Nash sleep it off in a cell, do you? And explaining in black and white how you thought nonconsensually drugging a suspect in a federal investigation was absolutely necessary can get a little tricky.”

“Is that experience talking?” Gibbs eyed him.

“No. They expected me to drug everyone, consenting or not.” Arthur stared back.

“Well, explain it any way you like. He won’t catch me.”

Gibbs’ laser-beam eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not willing to gamble everything on you.”

Tony sighed, sat up, and leaned back in a stretch.

“Sad to say, boss, but Eames may be right. Over the years, I’ve watched the guy cheat at everything from Baccarat to roulette and he’s pretty good.”

Gibbs did not look impressed by that dazzling recommendation.

“Did you think to stop him anywhere along the way – you being in _law enforcement_ and everything?”

Tony shrugged. “Probably. The point here though is that rushing the club poses a few problems. You know how these places are. I mean, _you_ might not know but I know—”

Gibbs looked less impressed by the minute.

“Get to it, DiNozzo.”

Tony seemed used to the curt tone and borderline rudeness. He went on with barely a pause and no sign of self-consciousness.

“They’re crowded, Gibbs, and the Cage is one of D.C.’s newer hot spots which makes it even worse. There’s probably already a line around the block to get in. By ten tonight, it’ll be a mad house. Add to that the fact that we still aren’t sure how Nash got his brother’s phone or if Turner is involved in his own right and it’s a nightmare. Anyone we find in there will likely be armed and the risk of catching a bunch of intoxicated civilians in a fairly brutal crossfire is pretty high. If there’s a way to avoid it, we should probably take it.”

Arthur would have missed it if he hadn’t been standing right next to the man. To the casual observer, Gibbs looked like a man with a mission, intolerant of delays and impatient with his senior agent’s rambling asides and movie quotes. But Arthur was close enough to pick up on the slight flare of his nostrils, the brief clench of callused fists, the way those blue eyes flickered over Tony every few minutes as if to make sure he was really there and okay. He’d done it himself often enough with Eames to recognize the signs – and the attempts to cover them up. Gibbs had it bad.

The knowledge that they shared a common misery did not make Arthur feel any more warmly towards the man.

“I still don’t understand why we need to tap Nash’s subconscious in the first place,” McGee said, bringing up live shots of the nightclub on one of the plasma screens. Tony was right; the crowds were already gathering. “Is there some advantage over doing it the old-fashioned way? Just bringing him in and interrogating him, I mean.”

Eames tossed the dregs of his take-out into the trash and ticked the points off on his fingers. Suddenly, Arthur couldn’t seem to stop staring at them: thick, blunt, oh-so-capable fingertips that could make Arthur’s body sing with the lightest stroke—

 _Jesus._

He turned away to find Gibbs watching him.

“One, we know he’s been selling these devices to anyone with a mobile and the time to chat. Two, using the device appears to be significantly impairing the judgment of those who use it at best. At worst, it’s turning them into raging psychopaths – unless you believe your Navy SEAL suddenly developed a taste for international black-marketeering and suicide.”

“Greed is universal,” Gibbs murmured and Arthur could see how much that admission cost the man.

“Unlike having a death wish, however, which remains somewhat rare,” Eames went on. “Given those two points, I think it might be helpful to learn who else might be running about with one in their possession. With greatest respect to Agent Gibbs, if Nash survived Cobol’s creative interrogation techniques, we will likely all be dead of old age before he coughs up anything useful through your more traditional methods.”

McGee frowned and Arthur smiled grimly. Finally, someone was connecting the dots Eames seemed so determined to overlook.

“But if using the device might be causing psychological damage—“

“Not might. Is.” Arthur cut Eames off before he could launch another counter-argument. “We don’t need more dead bodies to be sure about the after-effects of that device – and that includes you.”

“I’m hardly going to die over this, darling.”

“How do you know?”

“How many of the victims were forgers, Arthur?” Eames asked, undeterred.

“Not the point. There aren’t that many forgers in the business to begin with – and most of those are already routinely spending vacation time in psychiatric hospitals. You’re probably at greater risk from that thing, not less.”

Arthur had to fold his arms to hide the shaking now. He was self-aware enough to admit to being scared. He knew better than anyone that Eames’ layers of bad clothing and unrepentant humor hid a backbone of steel but he needed the man to back down on this.

“My hold on reality is perfectly intact, Arthur. I’m not about to go shooting myself off a rooftop any time soon.”

“You didn’t see Chavez.” The memory of the man’s last moments was seared into Arthur’s brain and made him grateful he no longer dreamt on a regular basis. “A simple totem won’t cut it here.”

“My totem is hardly simple.”

“A gambling chip? Really? Your totem’s notorious, Eames. Every fledgling forger starts out with a gambling chip. I guess it could be taken as some sort of weird compliment.” Arthur sighed. “That’s how you’re taking it, aren’t you?”

Eames’ smile was breath-taking. “But, darling, didn’t you know? You’ve always been my totem. You are impossible to forge, Arthur. Not even my own projections come anywhere close to reality. The chip is purely window dressing.”

They might as well have been babbling in Swahili as far as Gibbs and his team were concerned. Arthur could read the frustrated confusion on their faces but he didn’t have enough left in him to care. Eames had told Arthur he loved him and he had declared Arthur his own personal totem, all in the span of a handful of hours. The declaration of love could have been mistaken for the off-hand statement Eames had made it – except that the man had been careful all this time to never use the word in passing, in lust, or, most tellingly, even in jest. But the latter – the latter in the language of the dreamscape was tantamount to a declaration of forever and Arthur was suddenly so terrified of losing Eames, of losing everything they’d worked so hard to carve out for themselves, that he couldn’t see for a minute, had to take several long, shaky breaths before he could even speak.

“Eames, I can’t,” he finally managed, his voice a whisper.

 _Please_ hovered somewhere in the air. Eames stared at him and finally relented.

“Alright, darling. Then I suppose we’ll have to do this Gibbs’ way.”

When he shifted to watch Eames’ walk to the men’s room, Arthur found Gibbs looking at him with a strange, sad intensity. For a man who Arthur suspected lost precious few arguments, Gibbs looked anything but happy about winning this one. Before the possible reasons why swamped him, Arthur turned and followed after Eames.  
♥  
Eames leaned down and splashed water on his face in a futile attempt to drown out fatigue. When had he slept last? Not since Sao Paolo certainly and erratically even then. He rarely slept well on a job. Dinner had been a mistake but eating had at least given him something to focus on other than the pained look of betrayal in Arthur’s eyes. Arguing further had become an impossibility. Gibbs would storm the nightclub, no doubt leading the charge, and Eames would cover Arthur in Kevlar from head to toe and hope for the best.

He would stop remembering every single bloody time he’d ever seen Arthur die in a rain of bullets as they tried to shoot their way out of a bad extraction. He would stop imagining how Arthur would look with a single bullet to the brain, beautiful face blank and vibrant energy gone, because one single fucking bullet was all that was necessary in this reality and Arthur still had no appreciation whatsoever for his own mortality in it.

He would start planning their early retirement because there wasn’t a chance in hell that Eames would ever again be able to send Arthur off on a job, assuming they survived this debacle, without imagining him going quickly mad from being accidentally attached to one of these PASIVs. Despite living through years of Tony’s glowing avowals of admiration for the man, Eames had no real faith in Gibbs’ ability to extract anything useful out of Nash in a traditional interrogation.

The plan, such as it was, was in place, and Eames made peace with the plan. Behind him, the door creaked open and Arthur slipped in, movements jerky and stiff unlike his usual.

“Arthur?”

“I’m jealous of everybody,” Arthur blurted out, hands clenched. “Tony. Abby. Even Gibbs. They start talking to you and I want to shoot them. I don’t even want to know about the suit.”

Eames snorted, unsurprised at Arthur’s chosen outlet for his anxiety.

“Well, I’m certainly not interested in fucking any of them. Honestly, Arthur. Gibbs? It’s simply conversation. One tries to get along.”

“No one hires me to get along.”

“I know that. What is this about?”

Eames looked up into the mirror. Arthur stared back, eyes haunted and a fine tremor in his hands. Eames recognized uncharted territory and grew very still.

“You said you loved me.”

Eames kept his tone light. “Did I?”

“You said I was your totem.”

“I remember what I said.”

“Did you mean it?”

Eames kept silent. He turned, reached for Arthur’s shaking hands, and found them ice cold.

“I’m so much farther down this road than you and I don’t even care,” Arthur said with a hoarse laugh, looking down at their joined hands. “You love me but I need you, Eames. I need you like I need air and you – you could still walk away from me, from this, from us. I know that but still—“

“Oh, Arthur.” Eames ran a thumb gently across the other man’s lower lip.

“Please.”

Arthur closed his eyes, breathed the word against Eames’ fingertips, and snapped his fragile, momentary peace in two. They kissed without finesse and without preliminaries, sudden, wet, filthy, and full of hunger. Too long apart. Too much unsaid. Eames wanted everything at once, a blazing assault to his senses to match the fire that licked at him from within. Arthur pulled at him with hands that were far from steady and just a hair too harsh as he ground their hips together. The smell of bergamot and cinnamon – from Arthur’s ungodly expensive cologne – flooded Eames’ senses and soaked into his pores.

“I can’t walk away. You know I can’t.” Arthur carved the words into Eames’ skin, biting them into the flesh in tiny, fierce crescents. “I can’t, Eames, and I don’t care. I need – god! I need so much.”

“I know what you need,” Eames whispered, head spinning, drunk on the taste of Arthur in his mouth, the feel of Arthur against his skin, the sound of Arthur’s frantic begging inside his skull. “I know, darling.”

He dropped to his knees, pressed the palm of one hand against Arthur’s swollen length through layers of offending fabric, and looked up. Arthur stared back, eyes blind with need. Somewhere at the back of his mind, a voice screamed that the door wasn’t locked. Someone could walk in at any moment. Eames didn’t care. He tugged down Arthur’s zip and freed the man’s cock. Nothing else.

“I’m sorry, Arthur.”

One brief lick – just at the tip. A taste. A nibble. Familiar flavours. Arthur’s dark eyes widened, pupils blown, breathing in short, panting gasps as Eames surrendered, freely ceded the control the man needed back to him.

“I’m sorry I worried you.”

A longer lick – along the underside and to the base. Just enough to make Arthur shudder and moan and tilt his head back against the orange wall behind him.

“Eames.” It was barely a whisper.

“I’m sorry I pressed you.”

A tug this time – lips clamped tight around hot flesh. Eames knew what people – both men and women – thought about when they stared at his mouth. It was high time Arthur appreciated the fact that only he enjoyed the opportunity to do this. Eames hummed, low in his throat, and almost smiled when Arthur jumped, jerked forward, eyes searching instinctively for him then locking in on where Eames continued to gently suck. When Arthur actually whined, need and frustration and fear and love curling through him like tangled vines, Eames pulled back.

“Bastard!” Arthur hissed, head thumping back against the wall again. But, this time, his eyes stayed fixed on Eames’ mouth. Eames let those lips curve into a smile.

“I’m especially sorry that you think I can walk away from you – from us. Because I can’t, Arthur. No more than you. I meant all the words. They were all for you. I love you.”

Eames breathed in and swallowed Arthur down deep, careless that the words didn’t echo back because that hardly mattered when Arthur – of all people – was sobbing in his arms and clinging to his shoulders as if he were life itself. Another slow swallow and another low hum had the man screaming and set those clever, clever fingers scrabbling desperately over Eames’ clothes.

Passion and need collided and devolved into hot, fast, panting breaths and harsh, biting, beautifully painful kisses. Hands pulled and tugged and clenched until clothes and fastenings lost the war against blind, aching hunger. Eames found himself hauled to his feet, turned about, and pressed up against the bank of sinks once again. He stared into the mirror and watched Arthur’s wild, wild eyes as he wrapped one hand around Eames’ neck before biting down where neck and shoulder met. Eames moaned softly as the other slender, talented hand raced from chest to groin and stroked him through his trousers.

Hard. So fucking painfully hard. Every stroke was a brand, a flame, and Eames felt something electric race down his spine. He arched into it, knew Arthur watched him through eyes that saw everything – his own need, his surrender, their beauty together. Eames had never been more certain of anything than he was in this - that he and Arthur, in all their strengths and flaws, were Beauty Incarnate.

“Jesus, Eames!”

“Don’t stop.”

Arthur pressed desperate lips against his neck. “Lube—“

Eames plucked Arthur’s hand off his cock and shoved it under the soap dispenser. At the same time, he reached over and wrenched open the condom dispenser. There wasn’t time for finesse. They hadn’t bothered with condoms in forever but soap was a crap lubricant and the federally funded condoms came greased, which, all things considered, was promisingly forward-looking. Eames ripped the packet open with his teeth and reached back to help Arthur roll it on with trembling fingers. They were well past simply fucking and they both knew it.

Of course, Arthur wanted slow, sensitive to every hint of Eames’ discomfort, legs still shaky in this new landscape. Eames, who had put down roots here quite some time ago, wanted fast and wouldn’t settle for anything else. When Arthur finally finished with his prep and stretch and began a slow nudge into Eames’ heat, he pressed Arthur’s hand to his abdomen, bit his lip against the inevitable cry, and pushed back. They came together with a speed and force that had Arthur swearing. Eames dropped his head and smiled, savoured the bite. He’d wanted Arthur’s mark to be something more permanent and this would do. A searing brand to his soul.

“Eames—” Prayer. Benediction. Plea.

“Fuck me.”

He felt Arthur tremble, head to toe. “How—”

“Fast. Make it fast. Arthur.” A breath. A pause. Time stopped for the span of a heartbeat because, though Arthur had said it, he never had. Not like this. “Please.”

“Oh, god,” Arthur moaned, eyes shiny dark and lost. He gripped Eames’ bare hips as if they promised him salvation. “Just hold on.”

Their ride was fast, even brutal, because Arthur never managed anything in half-measures and Eames had become his world. Eames relished the flush across the man’s brow and neck, the dishevelled hair and the wrinkles in that perfectly pressed shirt that Eames had managed when untold hours of international travel had failed. They would all know what he and Arthur had been doing in here and he loved that, too, loved the idea that he would leave his mark on Arthur. Beautiful, untouchable, unflappable Arthur.

Eames slapped sweaty palms against the mirror and felt them slip across the smooth surface until heat and sweat and the force of Arthur’s thrusts helped him gain purchase. Everything narrowed down to the press of Arthur against his back, the heat of the man melting into his bones, the delicious pleasure-pain-friction of where they joined in the fuck, the indescribable explosion of feeling so deep inside every time Arthur hit him just right. Eames felt Arthur link their fingers together and looked up.

“Close,” Arthur whispered, face flushed and desperate. “Come with me.”

He tried to pull away, to reach for Eames again, but Eames tightened his grip and kept them locked in place together.

“Like this,” he said in a voice so hoarse he barely recognized it. “Just like this.”

Despite everything, Arthur’s eyes widened.

“Oh, god. Eames,” he begged.

“Fucking move faster.” Eames’ vision started to blur. “Arthur!”

Arthur pressed bruised, parched lips to his temple as their pace picked up into the ridiculous. Eames’ world started to shake apart and he laughed, let go, let his head roll back against Arthur’s shoulder as he waited for the now inevitable.

Suddenly, Arthur’s breathing hitched.

“Fuckfuckfuck,” he chanted in Eames’ ear. “Look at me, Eames. Please. Jesus. Look at me.”

Their eyes locked in the mirror.

“Don’t close them,” someone said. “No matter what.”

“Can’t—”

“Can.”

“Forever. Say it.”

“Fuck! Don’t stop.”

“Say it!”

They gasped together, now, then stopped.

“Forever.”

And Eames’ world flashed to blinding black.  



End file.
